Last week a gave Robert Burk some tips on making his blog look different/better than the default styles we get to play with on our hosted Community Server.  This was more like my general guide for "teaching others how to fish" rather than specfics that I gave before. 

  • Find other blogs whose style you like to find a good basic theme, or browse the theme selection on your blog in the Settings page. Open the HTML on a blog user's page to see what basic theme they are using. You can see this near the 6th line of the HTML that starts with <link rel="stylesheet".
  • Download that theme’s style sheet. For Josh (and now me) that link is:
  • Using the Community Server Settings menu, change your blog's base theme to the base theme of the blog you liked the most.
  • Start playing with the CSS Overrides.
    • What you’ll notice when you open up the CSS styles is that each style sheet can override the one before it.  The last set of styles applied are your custom ones.
  • Look at CSS sheets (a) and (b) to find out what you want to change, and start experimenting trial and error by tweaking things one at a time.  When you need to know what properties are available for an object type like a list item ( <li> ), do a web search for "CSS LI Properties" and you’ll find a ton of pages that show you all the tweaks you can make to the list items.