Moving to Your Layout

The next step is, of course, to make it look like your site.  I assume that, to do this, you already have a "template" of sorts made out of html - your site without the main content.  If you don't, making one would help markedly, but you may be able to wing it too.

Once you have this done, you'll want to split it into two parts: the header, and the footer.  Doing this makes it much easier to customize things, and can even make it easier to design your own site (with basic shtml or PHP includes.)  Put these two parts in a "header.php" and "footer.php" - don't worry, they don't have to have HTML in them at all, but they can.

The next step can be done in two separate ways.  One is cleaner, and makes it easier to use SSI to power your site (as is done here.)  The other is notably simpler and easier.  I'll cover the simpler one first.

Next, you'll want to make a copy of the default theme.  To do this, go into your administration center, and select "Theme and Layout Settings".  From there, under "Install a New Theme", type a name for your theme next to "Create a copy of Default named" and click Install!  You will be prompted to click OK - please do so.

Now you have a copy of the default theme.  If you want to customize the images for your theme, go to the theme's settings and change the URL from default/images to "yourname"/images, and use an FTP client to copy the files from default into your theme.

After this is done, you can use the style.css in your theme's directory to customize most of the colors.  Of course, this isn't exactly what you're looking for, but bare with me and get those customized.  There are comments in the file, but the main ones to worry about are titlebg (blue), windowbg and windowbg2 (shades of gray), and bordercolor/tborder. (backgrounds for tables, grid lines, etc.)