Ordinary self-hosted WordPress users know only too well that even though choosing and using thousands of available themes is a snap, creating one is an almost impossible task. You could use one of the customizable themes to modify the look to your liking, but that’s as far as you can go. Theme creating is not for the faint-hearted who are afraid to plunge into HTML, PHP and CSS coding.
But that’s not the case anymore. I recently stumbled across a WordPress theme editor plugin called Stiqr – still in beta as every other Web 2.0 service is – which can help ordinary web users to become a “skillful” web designer. If you can drag and drop objects, you can modify the look of your web. Self-hosted WordPress is officially included in the list of supported type of websites.
And everything is done without the need for a standalone web builder application, or the coding knowledge. All you need is a browser.
Setting Up The Stage
If you’ve always wanted to design your own website but the all the technical terminologies scared you, now is the perfect time for you to start. Visit Stiqr and click on the “Get Started Now“.
But don’t expect to see the ordinary sign-up process because it’s not that obvious. Before going through the “Enter Your Name” and “Enter Your Email” routines, you have to insert one line of code in your website. But you don’t have to tremble with fear, because all the steps are painless in WordPress.
Stiqr will provide you with the code, save it to be used later.
Armed with the code, login to your WordPress.
Then navigate to the right sidebar, and click “Editor” under the “Appearance” menu.
Within the WordPress theme editor plugin, find the “Footer (footer.php)” and click on the link to edit.
You will see the editable lines of codes for “footer.php“. Navigate to the lower part of the codes and find the closing line for the body – “</body>” – and insert the code that you got from Stiqr above it. Then click the “Update File” button.
After the “File edited successfully” notification appear, go to the main page of your WordPress by clicking “Visit Site” button next to the title of your blog.
That concludes the preparation stage.
Turn Your WordPress Into A Sticker Scrapbook
On the front page of your WordPress blog, press the key combination of “Shift + F2” to start Stiqr. As a first time Stiqr user, you will have to register first. Start by entering your email address and click “OK“.
Then continue by choosing your preferred password followed by another “OK“. My advice: please come up with a strong password for this one.
If the registration is successful, a notification window will pop-up along with a thank you note and what to do next: wait for the page to be refreshed and press “Shift + F2” button one more time.
You will be asked to enter your password to log in. Some might think that this step is unnecessary, but you really need the protection since everybody could access this page. You don’t want anybody to mess around with the look of your site, do you? This is also the reason why you need a strong password.
Upon successful login, an editor bar will appear at the bottom of your page. You can start using the tools and let your creativity go wild.
I will save the the discussion about editing the look of your webpage using Stiqr for the next part of this article. Until then, you can experiment and get yourself familiar with this cool web-based WYSIWYG web editor.
So far, my opinion about Stiqr is that it has opened up a whole new horizon that I’ve never thought possible: live editing the look of WordPress (or any other kind of website) directly from the browser without the need for coding knowledge. I am absolutely sure that I’ll use this service often in the future.
What do you think of Stiqr? Do you know similar services out there? Please share using the comments below.
Tagged: blogging tools • themes • wordpress
