Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 9
Discovering, Modifying, and
Designing Themes
In This Chapter
Finding and installing themes from the Theme Garden
Modifying the HTML for a theme
Creating your own theme and submitting it to Tumblr
Exploring online theme tutorials
If the eyes are a window to the soul, think of your Tumblr theme as the favorite outfit you
wear when you go out for a night on the town. You want to look sharp, be attractive to
the right audience, and let people know more about you by the flavor of your ensemble.
In other words, your Tumblr theme shouldn't just sit there, it should do something; it
should tell your visitors — visually — more about who you are and what you like, and
hopefully complement the kinds of content that you post on your site.
As of now, 1,275 free and premium themes are featured in the Tumblr Theme Garden, and
that number is growing daily. In addition, there are hundreds of other themes available,
for free and for a fee, directly from developers' websites. In this chapter, you discover
how to explore and use Tumblr's Theme Garden. You then find out how to install and cus-
tomize themes and edit a theme's HTML, and where to go online to learn more about de-
veloping your own custom Tumblr themes.
Exploring Tumblr's Theme Garden
Of the roughly 46 million people currently on Tumblr, over 3 million of them are still using
the default Redux by Jacob theme, shown in Figure 9-1. While that statistic might have
something to do with the number of stagnant Tumblr accounts that were started and
then abandoned, the prevalence of the Redux theme might have a whole lot more to do
with people's fear of “messing up” their blog or breaking something in its workings that
they won't know how to fix.
