Customizing Bueno: Mi Piace Kate

We all want our blogs and sites to feel like “us,” and there are tons of tweaks that can turn a plain ol’ theme into a bespoke web experience for the discriminating blog connoisseur. Last month, we looked at how one online mag transformed the Oxygen theme; today we’ll check out how one blogger took the third most popular theme on WordPress.com and built something entirely her own.

Say ciao to Mi Piace Kate:

“Mi Piace Kate” is Italian for “I Like Kate,” and we definitely do! Kate’s a graphic designer, cat aficionado, and handcrafting devotee who’s taken the free Bueno theme and run with it. Her blog is a stellar example of how some custom images and a $30 Custom Design upgrade can change a free theme into a million-dollar site that’s totally unique.

Take a look at the standard Bueno home page next to Kate’s:

If you didn’t notice the post date in the colored circle (pink in the original; chartreuse in Kate’s update), you might never know that this blog used Bueno. How did she pull it off? Here are a few of her (not-so-secret) techniques:

Custom header

Kate sets the tone with a custom header that both tells the reader a bit about her and the blog and sets the tone design- and color-wise:

Uploading a custom header doesn’t require an upgrade; it’s an option for any Bueno blogger (and for tons of other themes, too — 152, to be exact).

Thinking, “But I’m not a graphic designer”? You don’t need to be! Create some simple text in your word processing program of choice and save it as an image, or use a favorite photo that has meaning for you. Voilà! Instant personality.

Custom colors

Kate takes the colors introduced in the header and weaves them throughout the site, from the colored circle around the post date to the lines under her widget titles. She’s doing this via the Custom Design upgrade, which lets her pick the exact shades she loves and use CSS to apply them specifically where she’d like.

If you’re not loving the stock Bueno pink but the idea of CSS gives you the heebie-jeebies, we’ve got you covered: Bueno comes with seven different color schemes you can activate with a click by heading to Appearance → Theme Options, and you can use the Custom Design upgrade to change the colors of fonts and backgrounds even more, no CSS necessary. (If you want to dip your toe into the CSS pool, here’s a primer.)

Custom fonts

The bold fonts are what draw a lot of you to Bueno in the first place, but if you’re digging the Bueno layout and would like a different font look, the Custom Design upgrade lets you do that. On Mi Piace Kate, Kate’s opted to use the classic serif font Ambroise for headers and post titles, easy-to-read Museo Sans for regular post text, and the slender and elegant Raleway for titles and menu options. If you’re interested in exploring custom fonts, check out how a few other bloggers are using them and learn how to preview them for your own site.

Fun with text widgets

Kate wasn’t afraid to get under the hood and wrangle her widgets to get the exact look she wanted. Check out how she’s styled her blogroll, right. She’s changed it from a simple one-blog-per-line list to something with a different kind of visual interest that gels with the clean but playful look she uses across the blog.

How’d she do it? By using a Text widget rather than the Links widget most of us use for blogrolls. Since text widgets accept basic HTML, she was able to drop all her links into a widget, separating each with a double backslash. Her custom fonts and colors took care of the rest.

Kate kicks off her sidebar with one of our favorite but underused widgets — a basic text widget with some “about” copy. Again, the widget pulls in all her customizations: colors, text, and CSS, so it’s providing information and context for new visitors to her site while reinforcing the Mi Piace Kate brand.

She’s also customized her widget titles, another of our favorite tweaks: “Links” becomes “I Like to Look,” and “About” becomes “Oh Hello.” No opportunity to inject personality into the blog is overlooked.

(For more on customizing widgets, check out our recent tutorials on working with text widgets and three free ways to customize your blog.)

Kate uses a mix of design- and tech-sense to create a blog that screams “Kate!”, but anyone can personalize their site with standard options like custom headers and creatively-used text widgets, or use the basic click-to-activate features of the Custom Design upgrade to go a step further. She’s definitely inspired us, and we hope she’s done the same for you!

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