Free WordPress Theme: Balance of Blue
I’m releasing a free WordPress theme called Balance of Blue. It’s intended for bloggers and businesses and it’s loosely based on the code I used for the Ministry Free theme.
It has two columns in the main content area and three in the footer. It’s a bit more graphically involved than previous theme releases but still errs on the simple side. It’s optimized for some ad blocks – a banner in the header and a 300 x 250 in the sidebar.
If you need help, just leave a comment.
A note about support for this theme: If you find a bug, something broken that doesn’t work correctly, please let me know in the comments, but I’m afraid I can’t always answer questions about customizations – how to add a graphic, change font colors, etc. These are not bugs, but enhancements. I’d love to answer every question, but a great deal of time is required to do so.
If you require graphic or styling customization, you can check out the services I offer through my freelance site, eGrace Creative. You are also welcome to find someone else to customize the theme or do so yourself. Enjoy it!
Update: 09/21/2009
I’d love it if those of you who are using the theme on a live site would post a link in the comments. You’ll gain a wee bit of traffic and it will encourage me greatly!
Adding Your Logo or Header Image
One of the most frequently asked questions about this theme is about adding your own image to the header. Open up header.php either in the Admin > Appearance > Theme Editor window, or in a text editor on your computer. You’ll find a line of code that looks like the image below…
You’re basically going to upload your logo or header image to the theme’s directory on your server, then link to it. Everything in red in the image below has been added to display my custom image. Notice that I’ve kept the php call to the title in tact, but have used it as the alt= text of the image for SEO purposes. It will only be displayed if the image can’t load.
Need help with something else? Peruse the comments to see if your question has been answered and if not, leave a comment of your own. I’d rather answer questions via comment than by email so that others may benefit from the public answers.
I'm a Christian, a Pastor to 
Thanks for this great theme Brandon! I am using it for my blog: http://aronparker.com/blog. Still have alot more to do to it. Thanks again!
Hi Brandon, Mo here again. Its a lovely sunny day in the UK today (surprisingly enough!) but my hopes for a productive afternoon are fast dwindling away from me. Whenever I try to upload a new post or page to my site it causes an error on the site. i.e.
The FastCGI Handler was unable to process the request.
——————————————————————————–
Error Details:
The FastCGI process exceeded configured activity timeout
Error Number: 258 (0×80070102).
Error Description: The wait operation timed out.
HTTP Error 500 – Server Error.
Internet Information Services (IIS)
Have I somehow corrupted the theme, or is this a problem many are experiencing. I look forward to hearing back from you and hope you are well and good over there in the USA
Regards
Mo
Wow, I've never heard of that before, but I must say, 99% of my work has been on LAMP servers, so I'm not familiar with IIS errors. This one might be worth posting or searching over a the forums on WordPress.org.
Hi Brandon
thanks so much for your reply. I did look on the WP forums and found that many people were having the same problem as me that day. Just for future info, it turns out that the plug in 'tweet this' had to be disabled and then the new version loaded. I disabled all my plug ins and then reloaded them just for good measure.
Thanks again
Mo
Brandon, once again, thank you for Balance of Blue. It's great. Passing along comments from many others, it's great.
Here it comes. There is always a but. But, the blue triangle bullets in "Recent Comments" just won't cooperate. They are indented and appear on top of text. This happened once at the start. I got them to not appear at all until I upgraded to IE8. Now, they appear for each entry uniformly. In case you can't see it, I will shoot you a jpg.
Would you consider doing an upgrade to fix that?
Many thanks.
Hi Brandon, I did email you through egrace but didnt get a reply. Basically I am using your New Balance of Blue theme and i love it but would like to have my own header. As a non-technie I have somehow built my site from scratch but cannot find a way to do the header myself, I have an image that I would like to upload and wondered if I could commission your services on a paid basis to assist me with this
Thanks again Brandon
Mo
Mo, I apologize for my excessively busy week – have been a bit behind on answering comments and emails. I'd be happy to help. If you don't mind, try me again at brandon [ at ] egracecreative [ dot ] com and attach your image – I'll see what I can do. Thanks so much!
Brandon,
Please give me a response. I received an email as though there should be a response but it was missing.
@Roy Johnson -
@Roy Johnson – Roy, this is an issue I haven’t encountered yet and I’ll look into it as soon as I can. Thanks for letting me know.
Dear Brandon,
I’m using your Balance of Blue for a membership site. I love the styling. You did a great job!
I’ve read through your posts here and found another person who wanted to change the font and/or color of font in the header. My concern, exactly.
I went to the style.css as you mentioned and saw the header section, but I couldn’t figure out how to change the main title to color #f5be63. I would like the hover color to be white (ffffff). I want the main title to be Comic Sans. Where do I list that in the script?
I also would like the sub-title (description) to be white instead of gray/blue because I changed the background color to be darker (thanks to Photoshop).
Every time a made a slight change in the .css for the font, it either didn’t work or it made the entire heading white (no blue). I finally became frustrated and decided to write.
These posts help a lot!!
Please, if you have time, help. Thank you,
Gail
Gail, no problem – anything for bluegrass! In style.css, find and change these lines…
p.site-title between the {brackets} add font-family: comic sans, comic-sans;
p.site-title a change #fff to #f5be63
p.site-title a:hover change #ddd to #fff
That should do it.
And as a bonus… a post from Brian Hoff about this thing we call “comic sans” (in good fun).
Hi,
I’ve read how to put the 468 60 banner on the header and I managed to do it with no trouble. But, how am I going to insert the 300 250 on the sidebar? Using a widget? Or is there a way to do it in the theme editor?
Thanks.
P. S.: it’s a very beautiful theme!
Yes, you can add the 250 into the sidebar using a text widget. Just put the code in the text box and title it “Sponsors” or something of the like. Or you can do it manually by opening sidebar.php and inserting the ad code between widgets. Thanks for the compliment and I hope I’ve helped.
Great theme, Brandon….nice work. I’m just learning how to use wordpress for a website (not a blog at this time) and was attracted to the professionalism that Balance of Blue shows. Right now I’m trying to change the footer to your “standard” blue, and I’m having trouble with the top part of the footer, where site info, pages and blogroll are listed. I was able to change the lower part, but it looks like the upper part may be an image? Could you pls send me either a new image in #003466 or tell me what lines of code to change? Thanks……much appreciated.
Hi,
I have been trying to find a plugin like the one you have here: “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail”. Can you give me its name?
Thanks,
Maurício.
Sure no problem, here’s the link.
Since mine is a subscription website and I’ll be collecting e-mail addresses, I would like to put a “Privacy Policy” link or actual 8pt text in the side bar under the “Sign Up” section.
Can I add text to the sidebar? And, if so, how?
Thanks!! (again)
Gail, yes, you can do that by either adding a text widget, or just open up sidebar.php, find the spot you want the text to appear, and add it.
Thanks for a great theme, it’s almost exactly the design a client of mine has been looking for.
Cheers,
Karl
Hi Brandon.
Did you check your theme for Wordpress 2.8 compatibility? :-)
Tim, I plan on checking all of my themes, but I’m totally covered up right now. WordPress should really check with me before they release updates on time. :)
Hey Brandon great theme. I was wondering, how do I change the color of the text in the post? I would like to make it darker. Thanks for your help.
Ron, the short answer – look at the top line of the style.css file. You’ll see color: #444; or something like that. Change those 3 digits to change the color of everything that isn’t specifically styled elsewhere. The longer answer… I style everything one color, then style specific elements like h1 tags and h2 tags throughout the stylesheet. But I always leave main content paragraphs unstyled so that they are set by this main top line.
Brandon,
I’m changing WP themes on my patrickschriel.com blog from Balance of Blue to Thesis. Not because I don’t like your theme anymore but Thesis is giving me more flexibility. In fact I like the BoB design so much that I would like to tweak the new Theme to resemble BoB.
Do you mind if I do this, reusing the header and sidebar jpg’s and font settings of BoB?
@Patrick – Not only do I not mind, I encourage it. :) It’s creative. Further, I release all of my themes under a GPL license, which means you can do absolutely anything with them you would like except change the license. Best of luck and let me know if you need any help. Thesis is cool!
@Brandon – I’ve tested your theme agains WP 2.8 – it works pretty well :-)
Maybe I don’t use all features of 2.8 and in any case, I’m well satisfied with your theme! :-)
Dear Brandon, love your theme. I have groped around with your theme, and think I messed up the header file, since I can’t get a banner in there. I probably over-deleted text. Can I reload the theme without losing anything, or should I try to just mess with the header language relating to the banner? And is there a text version available somewhere? thanks for your help, Mary
Mary, it won’t hurt a thing to upload just the header.php file into the theme’s directory. Or you can open up header.php on your desktop using any text editor (like Notepad) and copy and paste the html and php back into header.php via Wordpress.
@Brandon – Thanks for your help. I am still terribly new at this, but am getting there. Mary
I love this theme. I would like to remove the bar just below the header that says “catagories” and has the “search our site” in it. I don’t need the search function as I am just using this as a static home page and there will be no blog functions on this particular website. I have looked over the code and can not find where this bar is located. I would really appreciate the help. Thank you. Great Job!!!
Hello Brandon,
Love the theme, specially the font, still playing with it and getting familiar. I noticed that when I try to add pages with a parent then the name of that page does not appear as a sub-menu in the menu bar. So if I create a page called ‘about us’ and then add a page ‘my profile’ with ‘about us’ as the parent, when I go to the menu under ‘about us’, I do not see the link to ‘my profile’. Any suggestions? I do know a little bit of coding so if you can suggest something, then I can add as well. Regards
Renu, because of limited space, I currently have the menu set to display pages only to a depth of 1. You can find this in the header.php file. You’ll spot the call to wp_list_pages and within the parentheses, you’ll see depth=1. Delete that and the menu will show all pages. Thanks!
Thank you Brandon, Tried doing it and you are right, the space limitation does mess up things and in fact was not able to see even the first level properly, any tips on on how to increase the space. The various options of wp_list_pages was not of much help. Regards
Thanks for sharing a such a awesome theme.
Will use it in my future projects.
Azad Shaikh
http://www.azadshaikh.co.cc
Hey Brandon,
I love the theme…I’m not sure what I have done but for some reason as you can see on my post the entire articles are no longer showing. If you look now on the last article How To Write Your First E-Book the article just cuts off into the column at the bottom? I’m trying to figure out how to fix this? Your help is appreciated..thanks.
I like it, very clean!
I really like the design of the theme. It’s very clean and easy to navigate. I”m thinking about using it for a few different sites I’m currently working on. Thanks!
Justin, glad you find it useful – thanks!!
Hi there Brandon. Thanks for the great theme. This has been my first blog and you have helped give a great touch to preceperi.com
Kudos and xie xie :)
Thanks Patrick – what a blessing!
Is there a way to remove the “Articles by Category” from the top of the first sidebar? I love the Theme!!!
Thanks CJ. Yes, just open up sidebar.php and every section begins with a div class=”widget” and ends with a /div. Just delete that section of code. I can’t print the entire code here or it will mess up this comments section, but I hope this helps.
Brandon, I tried that. Not knowing anything about php, I made a pretty good mess of the right sidebar. I think I want to do the same thing as cj. The bar with the brown background at the top shows three categories. However, I have 14 categories so far. I show the 14 in the right sidebar. I would like the brown bar at the top to appear blank; with no categories. Would you be willing to send file(s) by email attachment that would produce that result? Many thanks. And, thanks again for a great theme.
Brandon, we just used your Balance of Blue theme for GTG Associates’ website https://www.GTGAssociates.ca
Looks great, works well, good code – thank you sir!
D.Shak
Daniel Shakhmundes´s last blog ..WordPress 2.8.5: Hardening Release
Daniel, thanks so much for letting me know – looks great!!
Hi there
Love the theme and using it for my new business site (not currently gaining any money but maybe with this clean site it will.
My question is I want to put my branded log in the banner space, but not managed to work out how to do it… is there an ‘idiots guide somewhere’ I have the logo as a .png and .jpeg can i upload it someone and dies it need to be saaved where the theme files are?
many thanks
Gerry
Gerry, it’s impossible for me to show you the best way to do it in a comment because I can’t type the code here without messing some things up. Therefore, I added a note about this to the actual blog post above. Here’s a link back to the main article if you need it: http://www.brandonacox.com/2008/11/03/free-wordpress-theme-balance-of-blue/
Brandon, that’s an easy one. Rename the blank banner. Create another with the same dimensions and extension. Load it in the same folder and rename it to the original blank banner name. Presto. It works.
Roy Johnson´s last blog ..Port Tracker calls for positive growth in early 2010
Roy, I’m afraid there is no main banner in the html – just a text title, so I’ve pasted a couple of images of the code the way it needs to be fixed above.
It is possible to copy the background image that is supplied by the stylesheet, add a logo, and re-upload it, but the logo itself won’t become a part of the page’s content and you’d have to delete the title text, which could hurt the SEO.
Hey Brandon, I really like this theme.
I can’t seem to get the header image into the “header box”. It keeps appearing to the left and covers the title.
Joe Burnich´s last blog ..Discount Laptop Bag
That’s very strange indeed. I’m afraid it’s hard to diagnose without seeing your code, but basically, you need to make sure that you’re leaving the div tags in tact and just putting the link and image code inside the div – it’s the div itself that is told to float to the right, not the image.
I love wordpress themes. They are so unique and easy to set up compared to most others!
Design´s last blog ..Basement Design Pictures
Thanks for the theme Brandon, it’s nice and clean with good navigation.
I love the Balance of Blue theme and continue to learn a little more about its many features every time I add content to the site. I’m excited that my pagerank increased two points in the past couple of months.
Scott´s last blog ..Nature Videos and Photos…The More in GuitarMore
Hi Brandon,
First thank you for the nice clean theme, I really like it.
My problem is the positioning of the articles by cat and the recent posts columns.
If I click the about page or one of my article posts everything lines up O.K. but when I click the normal “home page” the cat and recent posts are now at the bottom!
Have I done something wrong or is it a bug?
My site is http://surviving-21st-december-2012.com
I am not to savey at coding and don’t have a clue how to rectify this, as I say I love the design of this theme so I hope you can advise me how to fix this?
Many thanks
Paul´s last blog ..2012: Nothing Will Happen
Paul – thanks for that! As far as the error goes, it appears that something in one of your posts is creating a new div, but not closing it, so when that post is present on the page, the sidebar actually gets contained by the content div (where your articles are).
You’ll notice on this page that the problem is present. It’s the box you have at the bottom of the post. If you try removing that feedback box and the problem is fixed, you’ll know the problem is in that box’s code. If that’s not the issue, let me know and I’ll look deeper.
Loving it..
I am using the theme for my website..
http://www.javeedpassion.com
Thanks for freebie..
Cool Javeed – thanks so much!
Hi,
Your excellent theme is in use on the Norwegian biogas project site http://biogass.net/
I’ve also taken the liberty to translate the PHP strings directly to Norwegian. If you made an update with .po/.mo capabilities, it would be easier to port it to other languages, too. And of course, I’ll provide my translation.
Thanks for your work!
Eivind Ø., Norway
Thanks so much for that! I will be updating all of my themes very soon and will definitely look into how I can make them ready for international translations.
thanks for the great article. it was helpful. one thing I would like to see is a good looking drop down menu…
Thanks – will keep that in mind.
Brandon,it would be great to find a possibility for a translation into German. In some weeks I release a wordpress blog and I´m very interested to test your wordpress theme. Super Job, it is quite different to many other themes I´ve seen before.