WordPress Child Themes
The child-themed approach requires more development and knowledge, but is a better option in the long run and offers more options when changing your website design. This is also a common approach used by freelancers and development agencies when modifying websites with pre-installed themes.
The child theme is an extension of the main theme. The aim is to grab everything that exists in the main theme and then cover only the differences. For example, if you have a PHP file in your main theme that outputs headers, you can copy that PHP file into your child theme and modify it. So once the sub-theme is activated, you will see the modified headers without breaking anything in the site/theme.
The same goes for styles: you don't have to override everything, you can just add external files with custom styles. It works like a customizer, but instead of injecting CSS code into the final web page, it loads files that you create and edit through child themes. You can read more about child themes and how to create a child theme in the WordPress Codex.
Also, an important point is that the subtopic approach requires more knowledge about server setup. You must upload the edited child theme file to the Latest Mailing Database host to see the changes applied on the website. This is why people prefer the customizer approach. Clearly, the customizer approach is inferior in the degrees of freedom that child themes provide .
But why a child theme in the first place? For a very simple reason - theme updates. After you update the theme for the second time, all changes you have made to the theme will be wiped. WordPress themes and plugins are regularly updated for a variety of reasons, including security holes. This is the only reason children's themes exist.
How to write custom styles
We've covered how to edit CSS, but what exactly should be written? Do you know what custom style you want? – Making design changes is not an easy task, which is why professional WordPress agencies like DEVRIX exist. Let's look at some of the most common styles that people need to apply on their website.
CSS is a simple language that is easy to understand, but also a complex language. The next section is for those with CSS experience and knowledge. For the sake of simplicity, we will only cover the following three main CSS concepts: selectors, basic properties, and media queries.
Selectors are methods for selecting specific HTML elements and applying styles to them. The selector itself does absolutely nothing. They just mark things and that's it. Here is an example of a selector:
.selector-name {}The dot at the beginning is labeled "class". The pound sign (#) is used for ID. Sounds good, but... how do you know what class to target an element to? The easiest way is to use your browser's developer tools. Just right-click on the element you want to position and select "Inspect Element". This definitely works on Chrome, and works in other browsers as well.