Title: Customising a Theme
Last modified: August 20, 2016

---

# Customising a Theme

 *  [EvaRosemary](https://wordpress.org/support/users/evarosemay/)
 * (@evarosemay)
 * [14 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/customising-a-theme/)
 * Hi, We’re new to WordPress and have selected Codium 1.0.9 as our first theme.
   Most of the customisation options appear straightforward but a couple of requirements
   are proving harder to implement.
 * We’d like to remove the “Leave a Reply” section at the bottom of each page except
   the BLOG page.
 * Also we don’t need the right hand side bar content and have managed to remove
   the content but cannot utilise the space freed up with content from the main “
   subject matter” area of the page. We guess that’s because the sidebar is a cell
   in an underlying table (or some other page formating feature of html).
 * It appears both these requirements require us to dig deep into the theme design
   which we’re not skilled enough to do right now. Could anybody provide some very
   basic advice before we invest too much time please?
 * Many thanks in anticipation
 * Eva and Rosemary

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

 *  [deepbevel](https://wordpress.org/support/users/deepbevel/)
 * (@deepbevel)
 * [14 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/customising-a-theme/#post-2456772)
 * Comments are normally selectable from the page editing screen. Just uncheck the
   box. Otherwise you could remove `<? php comments_template(); ?>`
    from the bottom
   of the page.php theme file under Apperance/editor. Or just add “/*” to cancel
   the code, like this:
 * `<?/* php comments_template(); */?>`
 * You may need a full width page template to remove the sidebar, you could also
   try removing/canceling get_sidebar from the page/post template code, (like with
   the comment) but it may tweek your layout, may have to mess around with the div’s.
 * You can do this stuff with the php code or css, I reccomend using Mozilla Firebug
   to find code for page elements.
 *  Thread Starter [EvaRosemary](https://wordpress.org/support/users/evarosemay/)
 * (@evarosemay)
 * [14 years, 5 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/customising-a-theme/#post-2456887)
 * Hi Deepbevel, many thanks for your feedback and apologises for the time taken
   to respond (we’ve been offline for a few days!).
 * Following your advice we found the control for “leave a reply” and that works
   perfectly. The moral of the story is we need to explore the available options
   more carefully !!
 * Regarding the sidebar, I guess the choice of theme is the easiest way to get 
   basic page formatting otherwise it appears to be a case of having enough html/
   php knowledge to customise a chosen theme radically?
 * We started out with the idea that we could produce a fairly sophisticated website
   without specialist knowledge. Please note our intended site is not necessarily
   a blog – though interaction with customers would be an interesting feature. Best
   Rgds, Eva
 *  [Michael](https://wordpress.org/support/users/alchymyth/)
 * (@alchymyth)
 * [14 years, 5 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/customising-a-theme/#post-2456888)
 * to stretch the content over the full width, edit this line in style.css of your
   theme:
 *     ```
       #container{margin:0 0 0 12px; padding:2em 1em 1em 1em;width:620px; background-color:#fff; float:left; display:inline; clear:both;}
       ```
   
 * change the width to `930px`
 *  [deepbevel](https://wordpress.org/support/users/deepbevel/)
 * (@deepbevel)
 * [14 years, 5 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/customising-a-theme/#post-2456894)
 * Yes, the theme you choose can save you much work, or create a ton of it, definatly
   look for something that has the basic layout and look you need without much tweaking.
   Or get a theme that has many customization options available through main admin
   settings so you don’t have to code so much. Still, the claim that WP makes it
   easy for anyone to make a site only applies to people who are okay with the a
   theme as is, always depends on what you want. Good luck!
 *  Thread Starter [EvaRosemary](https://wordpress.org/support/users/evarosemay/)
 * (@evarosemay)
 * [14 years, 5 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/customising-a-theme/#post-2456899)
 * Many thanks alchymyth for the technical solution which has worked perfectly and
   provide more insight into how all this works. Interestingly the change had no
   effect whilst I had two pages called HOME. When I renamed the page in question
   to something other than home the change came into effect!!?? I stumbled into 
   that.
 * Many thanks also to deepbevel you have confirmed what we were starting to figure
   out for ourselves. However, we will stick with WordPress for the time being as
   Codium is starting to take shape for us thanks to the help you guys have provided.
 * Once again, many thanks
    Eva and Rosemary

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

The topic ‘Customising a Theme’ is closed to new replies.

## Tags

 * [customization](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/customization/)

 * In: [Fixing WordPress](https://wordpress.org/support/forum/how-to-and-troubleshooting/)
 * 5 replies
 * 3 participants
 * Last reply from: [EvaRosemary](https://wordpress.org/support/users/evarosemay/)
 * Last activity: [14 years, 5 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/customising-a-theme/#post-2456899)
 * Status: not resolved

## Topics

### Topics with no replies

### Non-support topics

### Resolved topics

### Unresolved topics

### All topics