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To create a child theme and safely make changes that will overwrite a parent theme, do this:

1. create a new directory in your themes folder (this will contain your child theme files)
2. use a text editor (e.g. Notepad++) to create a new file in the folder you just created named ‘style.css‘
3. put this at the top of the file

/*
Theme Name: My New Theme
Description: Child theme for the blogolife theme
Author: Your name here
Template: blogolife
*/

@import url("../blogolife/style.css");

#menu-item-962 a {
    color:#3d21eb;
    font-size:2rem;
}

** The template line connects the child theme to a parent (in this case blogolife). If a file isn’t found in your child theme, WordPress will reference the file in the parent.

** The import line gets styles from the parent theme

** ‘#menu-item-962 a’ targets your Fishing Contest link which has an id of ‘menu-item-962’. Styles go inside the { } The color and font-size are just examples I added, change them to fit your theme.

in admin, navigate to Appearance | Themes. Find the child theme you created and click ‘Live Preview‘ to preview your site and see the new styles you created for the Fishing Contest link.

When it looks the way you want it to look, click ‘Activate’.

Add any future changes to your child theme style.css. That keeps them from being overwritten if you ever update blogolife.

For example, to change the color of your side links to orange, add this to your child theme style.css

.widget ul li a {
    color: #FAA61C;
}

In this example, the child theme is overwriting line 852 of it’s parent theme (found in themes/blogolife/style.css) where the link color is set to #666

Links in your side bar area are getting styles from theme file style.css line 852:

.widget ul li a {
    color: #666666;
    text-decoration: none;
}

Add any color, weight, font-family, etc. and refresh page / clear cache for changes to show up.

** Make sure to put changes in a Child Theme to keep them safe if the theme is updated.

Or, you can use a plugin like WP Google Fonts to change the styles for you.

in your functions.php, register a widget area with register_sidebar() called from ‘widgets_init’

function my_widget_area_init() {
	register_sidebar( array(
		'name' => 'Home Page Widget Area',
		'id' => 'my_widget_post_area_id',
		'before_widget' => '<div>',
		'after_widget' => '</div>',
		'before_title' => '<h2>',
		'after_title' => '</h2>',
	) );
}
add_action( 'widgets_init', 'my_widget_area_init' );

Change the ‘id’ to whatever you want. This will create a widget area that shows up in admin | appearance | widgets. You can drop your mini-loops widget (or whatever widgets you want to add) into the new area created in your admin.

Next, you need to tell the html to look for the widget area that matches the id and output any widgets you’ve assigned.

In your index.php put this:

if(!dynamic_sidebar('my_widget_post_area_id')) { echo 'nothing to see here'; }

Any widgets you’ve added in admin will appear in the new area. So if you add four widgets that each look for a specific type of post e.g. ‘news‘, ‘featured‘, ‘opinion‘, ‘a&e‘, you can fill in the areas with posts that match what you currently have on your home page.

Set ‘before_widget’, ‘before_title’, etc. or wrap the php in the if statement above in section, article, div or whatever html tags and attributes are appropriate for your site, and to give it the style you want. You’ve got similar options with mini-loops to set before item, add urls, etc.

Might be easier to leave the widget styles empty and recreate your current div class="colart" in the widget itself under the mini-loops format area.

** To use shortcodes in your widgets, you’ll need to have this in your functions.php if not already there add_filter('widget_text', 'do_shortcode');

To delete the CyberChimps image and link to cyberchimps website, remove everything Krishna indicated beginning with <a ... and ending with ... /a>

The title is generated here <title><?php wp_title(''); ?></title>

More information on how to use this function wp_title

Since you are not using the dash as a separator in the call to wp_title and since the site title shows up after the dash on other pages, just not your blog, check your theme or plugins to see if anything is filtering the title and adding the dash but not adding (or maybe removing) the blogname on your posts, resulting in <post title> – <nothing>.

Might look for an if/else that checks for is_single()

Setting define(‘WP_DEBUG’, true); in wp-config.php can often help you figure out what’s not working on a blank page.

You still may have reference to the category or tag base inside the ‘rewrite_rules’ option of the ‘options’ table in your database. Check the array for references to /blog.

WordPress will rebuild the list of rewrite rules if you rename the option_name value in that table to something like ‘rewrite_rulesbck’.