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Step Six: Final Steps

Now, you should be set with your basics. Here’s the final thing that I do to get the last few weird things in place.

You will notice that WordPress – upon using their tags and such – will add it’s own default classes and such. What I do at this point is open up my site in a regular browser window, and view the source code. (In Firefox, this is “CTRL” + “U”.) Then I look through the source code and find anything that I haven’t coded myself. For example, the sidebar. If you were using the regular wordpress PHP call for your sidebar list, then WordPress will generate your links in the sidebar similar to this:

<ul><h2>List Title Here</h2>
<li>link 1 here</li>
<li>link 2 here</li>
<li>link 3 here</li>
<li>link 4 here</li>
<li>link 5 here</li>
</ul>

If you don’t have any styling for UL or LI tags, then your sidebar list is gonna look weird. So this is the point where I start adding things to my CSS file that WordPress has placed in there, and style things as I want them to be.

Once you’ve saved everything and gotten your links all together as you’d like them to be, then validate your markup again. This should find the final niggles that may be in the way.

And that would be my final touch-up step.

Hopefully this little tutorial has helped you out. As I said in the beginning, this is only the basics of what I do. There’s a lot more you can do with the Loop and your sidebars and all the PHP coding that WordPress allows you to do – but hopefully this gets you started.

If I did go over your head with anything, please leave a comment and let me know – I’d like this to be very clear for anyone who wants to use it