Widgets are a powerful part of WordPress, and they’re a great way to enhance your site’s sidebar. Or your footer. Or your homepage. Or another part of your site that your theme maker thinks would look really good with some widgets.

If you’re like a lot of WordPress users, you’re always hitting walls. You can manage your site: write content, upload photos, even add new contributors. What you can’t do is customize it. You wish you didn’t have to call up a developer to perform miracles like the following:

As a very powerful, well-documented, and relatively user-friendly CMS, WordPress attracts a lot of do-it-yourself energy.

For a recent Press Up project, I wanted to change the running theme on a WordPress installation adjacent to some other PHP code that was doing some work. I knew it had to be possible, and I was even pleasantly surprised to find out how easy it was. It illustrates two novel things I’d not realized about WordPress before, so let’s dive in.

Our topic today is choosing a WordPress theme. Not surprisingly, the subject has come up before—there have been a number of general buyer’s guides written, and we highly recommend two in particular: “How to pick a WordPress theme that doesn’t suck” and “Choosing a new WordPress theme.”

It’s the week of Thanksgiving here in the USA, and that got us thinking about gratitude, and the things we’re thankful for. One of them is WordPress. It’s easy to take the software for granted, and skip straight to wishing that your social sharing plugin had a way to turn the Twitter bird upside down—or that TinyMCE didn’t eat your HTML markup when you switched to “Visual”—but gratitude for what you do have is a really healthy thing. We thought we’d take a moment to remember what makes WordPress such an amazing tool in the first place.

One request for help we hear far too frequently in our work at Press Up is: “I pressed an update button, and now my site doesn’t look right.” The cause is usually that people have customized the look-and-feel of their public site without using a child theme.

After finishing up with the new design for [wp], here are ten tips I’ve got to improve your [themes].

WordPress ‘Magazine’ themes haven’t been around for long, but they’ve exploded in popularity. In this post we’ll look at ten ways to get that elusive ‘magazine’ look into your own WordPress theme.

If you’re an RSS reader, you’ll have to jump out to see the exciting new Nometech design, based on a theme released by Smashing Magazine a while ago.