Creativix: Color Changes to Nav Bars, Slider Bar, etc.

I’ll admit; I’ve seen reference to child themes but will have to do more research to understand them and their designed purpose. I can do that, but right this minute I’m unclear on them;

Like I was saying, I have done some research and through a little self education and A LOT of trial and error, I have [at this point] learned how to edit text font, color, size, hover colors. I always first “back up” the css or php code by creating a copy in NotePad. So, in the event I inadvertently screw up the code (and consequently, my site), I just paste the copy back from NotePad to the css or php page. Probably not the best way but for my purposes it seems to be working.

What I am specifically trying to accomplish is a color change of the navigation bar, footer bar, slider bar and etc (where, at the moment, they are varying shades of gray). I want to be able to change these colors as this user has changed these elements to brown and white and blue: http://theresebogan.com/ (hope it’s OK to use actual sites as “models” on this forum??…).

For the fonts, it was easy because I could just browse the style php file (using the “theme editor” in WP) looking for color hex codes and, through trial and error, figure out which line of code controlled what. However, with those elements like the nav bar and slider I have discovered that, in the code, they are directed to png files which I subsequently traced back to theme directly (or whatever it’s called??) using godaddy ftp file manager. So my question is, do I have to in some way edit/modify each of these png files (which I do not have the software or skill to do) or is there another piece of code somewhere else or another tactic that I should be employing to do this?? The site owner of the above reference site said she was a novice so I would have to think that it isn’t overly complicated…

Any help is greatly appreciated. I’m driving myself crazy trying to figure it out 🙂

Sam

Thanks Socialmediapro,

However, that changes the text color… I would like to change the color of the actual navigation bar itself. I did some more digging and it looks like this is simply a PNG image which (I think) means that I would need to download the image from the theme registry (or whatever it’s called…via the FTP file manager) and then edit the image with Photoshop or something like that. So, that’s where I’m at right now…unless you know of an easier way???

Andrew, why do you caution against editing the stylesheet?

Thanks to both of you –

Sam