More Custom Headers, Color Schemes, & Theme Improvements

We want everyone on WordPress.com to be able to find the best theme possible for their blog. Something beautiful, amazing, and cool. A theme that makes you want to jump up, run your laptop next door, and show your neighbor your awesome blog. That’s why we love bringing you so many new themes, why we have over 150 themes for you to choose from, and why we have even more on the way. It’s also why every day you let us know different ways we could make all our existing themes just a little bit better. You contact us in support, add your suggestions in the forums, comment here, and — of course! — blog about it.

Because of all that we took as many of those little bits as we could and made our incredible collection of 150-plus themes even better for you.

More Custom Headers and More Color Schemes

We know how much you love customizing your themes and making them your own so we made sure that our best, our most popular, and our most beautiful themes let you do just that. The Custom Header Image feature lets you quickly add your own personal stamp on a theme. We went and added it to themes missing it that could really use it and use it well. You’ll now find that it’s available in themes like Notepad, Titan, Simpla, Grid Focus, and Chaos Theory.

And if you’re using the Modularity Lite theme, Inuit Types, Spectrum, Bouquet, or Vigilance you have new bonus color schemes to choose from. Coraline alone got five brand new color schemes!

Make sure you try out all the new design possibilities these color schemes bring to Custom Design.

Even More Theme Improvements

There were even more theme improvements. They were slightly smaller but good things come in small packages. Things like improving the custom header feature in our most popular theme, Twenty Ten. You can now change your header text color or even hide it altogether with a visit to Appearance → Themes and just a few clicks.

Sometimes less can be more

We also added Post Format support to the Spectrum theme. There are more customization options in the Structure theme, Misty Look, and Fruit Shake. Ocean Mist has customizable Featured Images for each post’s header image. Our most popular themes now have better comment labeling when comments are turned off and better author highlighting for multiple author blogs — making them perfect for blogs that are more like small business sites or magazines. And — and there are even more theme improvements that were done. Too many to list here!

We’ll keep on bringing you new themes. Keep on letting us know what you’d like to see improved with them. 🙂


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55 Comments

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  1. Margie

    It is great that you are not only offering new Themes, but making the old ones more flexible. Thanks!

    Like

  2. Kathrine Roid

    A big fan of customization here, and very happy to see these updates! I recently switched to NotesIL for my writing advice blog and am very pleased with it and its wide array of color options. I used to have Mystique – it went with my science fiction and fantasy genres well – but wanted something simpler.

    Like

  3. Orel Engel

    Wow this is good news!

    Like

  4. Matt

    Custom headers should be on every theme – they’re great.

    Like

  5. Sandra Pawula

    This is fabulous! I really appreciate how you keep fine-tuning to bring everything to new levels of excellence. There’s a lot to explore here on these upgrades themes. Can’t wait!

    Like

  6. Sam

    It would be AMAZING if not only the background, but also the text field background colour could be changed (I know you can probably do that with custom CSS but for the not so tech-y people it would be great to have that option.)

    I’d love a slightly brighter text field on my site.

    Like

  7. garlicfriesandbaseball

    Thanks again for your great suggestions and improvements. You’re the best!

    Like

  8. Mikalee Byerman

    You continue to wow us all … and I have LITERALLY shared with my neighbor how super-cool my blog looks thanks to the skills of your remarkable team! 🙂

    Like

  9. CosmosClara

    I absolutely LOVE WordPress! And this is GREAT news!! I’ll start tinkering with it tonight…. or real soon!! Sooo cool!! You guys are GREAT!!! You really give us the Options!! So important!! 🙂

    Like

  10. Bosstiger

    I really like these updates. Keep up the good work! I’m glad that Modularity Lite has an other option for color. 😀

    Like

  11. Ryan

    Very nice. 😀

    Like

  12. Semut Design (@SemutDesign)

    Great, more love to WordPress.

    Like

  13. deepbellylaugh

    Thanks so much of thinking to do this. Flexibility and the ability to customise is always appreciated. I will definitely check it out!

    Like

  14. dreamsburnred

    Awesome, great to hear :).

    Like

  15. vantagepointproductions

    Thanks. This is great news. I have a fairly new theme, Linen. It desperately needs customizable social media icons. I can’t even change the stock ones using css, not even the color … and they don’t match the look of my blog at all. I love what you do, but that’s an improvement I’d REALLY LOVE to see. : )

    Like

  16. Leslie (LadyMin)

    Thanks for the improvements. It would be nice if all themes had a custom header option.

    Like

  17. notquiteold

    I use Wu Wei, and I really like it, except for one aspect. Several readers have told me that they couldn’t figure out how to leave a comment because my format just has the “conversation bubble” rather than the word “Comments”. They had to write me an email so I could tell them where to look. I’d love to have the option to change that item.

    Like

  18. asheepylife

    Now I am spoiled for choice!! Thanks!

    Like

  19. acw1998

    Great idea!

    Like

  20. Wg.Cdr. Bellie Jayaprakash

    Great news for me since I keep changing the theme for my main blog [so that it looks ‘forever Fresh’] which has nearly 180,000 hits . I am looking forward to the day when I can use widgets and posts with Java script etc with the theme.

    Like

  21. Aaron

    Sometimes, less is more. So true.

    Keep up the great work.

    Like

  22. ShadowWing Tronix

    Now I can put a custom header onto my secondary site, using Notepad. This makes me happy.

    Like

  23. The Background Story

    I hope Nishita gets more customization options in the future! I do love that theme!

    Like

  24. Matt George

    The ability to have more colors is a big deal with themes. I look almost everyday on WordPress.com to see if there are improvements or new themes. I even look on the weekends even though it’s a given that there probably are not new themes or development announcements on the weekend.

    Like

  25. timethief

    Theme upgrades mean exciting new possibilities. Thanks for the fabulous selection of beautiful themes with a wide variety of features and customizable options. I’m always interested to see what your creative team will present us with next.

    Like

  26. Eric

    Fantastic! Can’t wait to try these customizations out soon.

    Like

  27. ζÔ§Η

    This is awesome, I’ve been hoping you guys would update the older themes soon and you did. 😀

    Like

  28. greatthingsinlife

    This is so Fab! 🙂 Now I have more themes to choose from.

    Like

  29. Bites Of Sweet And Spice

    Thanks for all these amazing improvements!

    Like

  30. Kilmore Fisz

    I like those improvements to old themes. This is a good idea.

    Like

  31. Laurie

    AGREED — I’m delighted that the existing themes are being made more flexible. WISH LIST — (1) that we would get to adjust the sizes of header images. I’ve often wanted to have a header image that takes up less vertical space on the page. (2) that we get a feature allowing us to have two different side widget configurations, and a button that allows us to choose which one goes to which posts and pages.

    Like

  32. lovingreen

    I love reading the updates too! I would love to see a way to make my homepage on Twenty-Eleven only show a preview of the most recent posts instead of the whole post. My posts can be a little wordy.

    Like

  33. lisa@notesfromafrica
  34. Vicky Costa

    Thanks again for your great suggestions and improvements.

    Like

  35. Christian Debbie Cheerilee Alvarez

    Cool! I especially love the idea of a custom header for the Notepad theme. But one problem about it is that having too many pages breaks the theme… Oh well, I guess the solution is to have less pages!

    Like

  36. Ian Stewart

    Yep! 🙂 We’ll have more free magazine-like themes coming soon.

    Like

  37. Tech-2

    I am very impressed with the loads of themes. And more impressed with those people behind it. Each theme shows character. Thumbs up.

    Like

  38. Billie Jean

    WordPress is awesome.

    Like

  39. Dave Bonta

    WordPress.com users might not appreciate just how much work has to go into maintaining all these themes to keep up with updates to WordPress core, quite aside from these more obvious changes. On a self-hosted site today, I was about to bid farewell to a theme I liked because it was so out-dated: Day Dream, by Jim Whimpey, from way back in 2006. Then I remembered that y’all had it here, checked in Dreamhost’s one-click-install theme library, and sure enough: there was the wp.com version with all the code updated! Yay!

    Like

  40. tipsjust

    Can’t wait to try these.Thanks!

    Like

  41. moni

    Since you guys are so great not just listening, but coming through, here’s my wish list: custom header and more color schemes for choco!

    Like

  42. Val

    Oh – I’ve just re-read this and have seen that you’ve now got a light version of Modularity Lite! That’s wonderful!! I gave up on that theme because I couldn’t read the pale text against a dark background! Brill! 🙂

    Like

  43. rugandreview

    All comments are great but I still did not find an ideal theme yet.

    Like

  44. greyhoundarticlesonline

    I would really love it if the default text color was black or a very dark gray. Some of my older readers – and I – have a lot of trouble reading gray text. To get around this, I’ve been manually changing every article page to black.

    Like

  45. severin

    Oh some useful info here, thank you.

    Like

  46. Jae

    More themes + more customizations = more awesome WordPress!

    Like

  47. Rivista Culturale

    great news! a custom header image, even a small icon to personalize DePo Masthead would be great news too..!!! pelase please add it!
    thx

    Like

  48. Nicole

    I wish we could change the fonts without having to pay! I hate that most themes use Times New Roman or a font like it!

    Like

  49. reflectzone

    Very nice to have something that can be distributed to others and could be useful for them … thank you

    Like

  50. Michael Steeleworthy (@steeleworthy)

    +1 to Dave Bonta’s comments. WP.com is a service that does cost money to run. A lot of people work for a company that gives a great (and largely free) blogging platform to so many users. Good job, gang.

    Like

  51. Apollodorosh

    The more themes an possibilities, the merrier and the better 🙂

    Like

  52. Helio

    Thank you WordPress. I really like this platform. I have started to use WordPress and I think that only the sky is the limite.
    Cheers

    Like

  53. lilmissbilly

    cool news !!!

    Like

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