Here’s a quick tip for customizing WordPress themes in Dreamweaver. When you find a theme you like but you want to change some of the CSS code or graphics, simply open the theme in your browser. Save the page to a file on your local hard drive and then open the page in Dreamweaver. As long as you saved the entire webpage, including images and CSS, you should see the page in Dreamweaver as it displayed in your browser (plus some of Dreamweaver’s design-mode quirks).

Now you have what you need to customize your theme. Simply edit the CSS file in Dreamweaver to your liking, and then save the CSS file back to your theme directory. If you changed any of the graphics in the WordPress theme, you will also need to upload those to your hosting server. When you preview your theme, it should display in your browser as you edited it to look in Dreamweaver.

This technique works for any visual changes, but if you need to change the actual structure of your theme, such as the PHP includes, you will need to edit the actual theme files within your WordPress installation. The CSS file controls the visual elements, but the page structure is defined in your page files.

See our blog post on creating WordPress themes in Dreamweaver for a more detailed explanation.