This article has a few hints on designing your own theme.

Choosing Colors

Good themes use related colors. They don’t have to, but having a nicely matching set of colors is generally considered good design.

The color picker allows you to use the cursor to select a color. You can specify transparency on the bottom bar. You can also manually enter hex, rgb, rgba, or named colors in the value box. If the color option had an initial value, you can click the “Default” button to restore the original color if you don’t like your new color.

Some themes use the same colors for all links, some vary. But using the same link hover color for all the different kind of links lends consistency to your theme. The same is true for the other colors – try for a consistent look in your theme.

Testing

The new Customizer interface makes testing your ideas easy. Many options support “live” preview. You changes show immediately in the preview window. Other options marked with the ↻ refresh icon require a full page refresh of the preview window. This usually takes just a second or two.

Why aren’t all the options live preview? There are various technical reasons for this. Some options (like the sidebar layouts) require that the actual generated HTML for the site be changed. This requires a refresh. Other options interact with the JavaScript used by Weaver Xtreme for some site layout. Others simply have a level of complexity that makes live preview too difficult. But we tried very hard to make as many options as possible display with live preview, and seeing that work is like magic.

Important: The changes you see in the preview window will almost always show up when you display your site in a different browser window. Depending on just how and when you display your site in a different browser window, there can be glitches. Most modern browsers will cache web pages it loads. Sometimes, this can make testing your site very difficult because the changes you make won’t show up because the browser has cached your page. If you find this happening, you should clear the cache. Some browsers (e.g., Firefox and Chrome) have plugins available that will let you disable the cache.

Also, you can have both the Customizer interface and the Legacy Settings Admin interface open at the same time in different browser windows. Please be aware that these two windows don’t “know” about each other. If you make a change in one settings interface, it won’t show up in the other automatically. In addition, the change will override whatever changes you might have made in the other window. If you are using both at the same time, you if you make changed in one option interface window, you MUST then manually do a full browser refresh page for the other option interface to keep both windows in sync.

Saving Option Settings

The changes you make to options from the Customizer interface are really “trial” changes. They show up in the preview window, but they are not permanent until you save your changed by clicking the “Save & Publish” button in the top panel. If you navigate away from the Customizer without first saving your values, everything will be lost. Note that you will receive a warning popup asking if you really want to leave the page or not.

Saving Your Own Theme

Once you have a design you like, you can save your work. You can then fiddle and fine tune more without losing your previous work. The easiest way to save your work is to go to the Appearance → Weaver Xtreme Admin → Save/Restore tab, and use the Save/Restore Current Settings using WordPress Database option. This will save all your settings in the WordPress database. Any settings you make will be preserved until you save new ones. They will survive theme switches and upgrades. If you want to restore those saved themes, click the Restore Settings button.

Weaver Xtreme basic version also allows you to save and save your settings on a file downloaded to your computer. There are two types of settings files – one that just saves the theme related options (and leaves out site specific options), and another that saves everything. These files can be downloaded to your own computer, or use by others to share you site design. And you can save many versions of your work.

If you are experimenting, it is a good idea to save copies of your work so you can get back to where you were.