Hacking Wordpress Themes

I don't know if you can it being a perfectionist, but i can't really rest until a site I have does everything I want it to do. If it doesn't fit, it just doesn't fit. The main issue with the template I was using before was space. I was running out of space. It didn't matter if I wrote a longer post or not, the sidebar still stretched out to be twice as long as the content. I wanted it to fit my average sized post better. The orange and black were boring me. Way too dark for my liking.

Right now, there is nothing in the budjet for a new theme. So the plan, to slowly morph the template into what I want it to do. I only really have the time to do this on the weekends. Creating content, advertising, promotion take up most of that time. So I started this last weekend. The mission, to finding stopping points in the modification where the theme looks good enough to be visible and stopping there instead of being tempted to move forward.

I don't know anything about the Wordpress, so I took a basic theme so I would have all the Wordpress markup. Then I took a Basic CSS Layout that I wanted to go with. After that I just pasted the markup into the template I was using. Now it's just a matter of tweaking all the presentation CSS to get it to where I want it.

I want a template that mazimizes the space available in the header section like John Chow or Darin Carter, but I am trying to squeeze two right sidebars in. And I went from wanting a fluid width to sticking to a fixed one. I figured if a 1024 browser resolution was most common, I could push the fixed width to 980px. Not too many blogs with a fixed width layout that are wider. I want two sidebars to float more of that content to the top. I figured one could be about 180px and the other a little wider. But that will be coming later.

But the template will actually have 6 "sidebars" for widgets. At least, I hope so. I am talking about it before it is done and it may not be something possible with wordpress. I don't want to have to hard code anything that may change into the template. I want it all to be editable through Wordpress.