Resources
These resources complement the video, How to Customize a Kadence Template | Recipe Blog Template.
Check out this video https://pips.podia.com/view/courses/blogging-101/1480459-module-3-branding/4673701-design-a-logo-in-canva to learn how to design a logo in Canva, as well as make a brand board. It's all part of the free PIPS training, Blogging 101, the Basics: https://pips.podia.com/view/courses/blogging-101
Learn how to use Kadence blocks.
Learn how to make reusable blocks in Kadence.
How to customize a Kadence Template
Customizing the Kadence Recipe Template | Part 1
This article is based on the transcript of the video, edited so that it makes sense! Use this to go along with the video.
Start off with the Kadence theme because it's very lightweight and it is easy to work with. Go to starter templates; I'm creating a recipe blog/DIY website. So food photography may be a good one, but let's see what else they have. There a lot of free themes in here, and here's one for recipe blogs. Let's try that.
Click on it and you can look around at the template. There's a nice big hero image and a blog post block, a shop block, which is good because I'm probably going to have maybe some Amazon affiliates or whatever and a newsletter block.
Let's click on the recipes and see what they look like. I really like the way this looks, and there's a nice recipe card layout.
I'm not going to worry about the color and typography sections right now. I can do that later.
I'm going to import the entire site. I already have a WordPress install so I'm going to delete everything that's in here and I'm going to be using Kadence blocks, which is a required plugin and that I already have. The recipe card plugin is required and I already have that; if I didn't, I would just add that in my plugins.
I'm going to import the customizer settings and the content so I'll have a great start to work from. So let's start importing. I'm going to import the customizer settings. Once it's finished importing we can take a look at our new site and it looks great. It looks just like the template.
Go into the admin area and check out the pages. These are all the pages that I'm going to need, home, about, contact, recipes. I'm not going to delete any of them because they're all fine.
Let's take a look at the recipe cards area in the admin. These are short codes. We'll talk about that later.
Let's go to the customizer. This is where we're going to start to work on the header. So that will come up in the next video.
Customizing the Kadence Recipe Template | Part 2
This article is based on the transcript of the video, edited so that it makes sense! Use this to go along with the video.
now that I have uploaded my template, I'm going to customize it. Click on customize and go into my header. I'm adding my logo that I made in Canva and I also made this hero image.
I'm going to put a link in the resources so that you can go and find a way to make logos and images in Canva.
So here's my logo, I'm going to make it bigger and I'm also going to move it. I'm dragging it over to the left. I'm not going to show the title, I just want the logo, so I click logo only.
It's cut off kind of funny so I'm going to design, I have some padding to let's see if that's going to help, and it doesn't. I move the navigation to the second line, and move the logo down as well. That logo looks a lot better now.
I really don't like this color. So I can click the gear on the left of the row to edit and whatever that color is, it's yucky, so I'm going to make it white.
So now I have my logo, I have my primary navigation and some social media buttons are already in there. I'm not going to have any social media right now, so I'm going to delete it for the moment. And I'm going to hit publish.
So now my header is the way I want it. So next thing will be to work on the hero image. To do that, I have to leave the customizer and I have to edit the home page.
Open the home page and you can see that the hero image has text box over the image. I'm not sure if I want it to be set up like the template. The text is in columns and there's a large padding area that is used to move the text boxes down into the middle of the image.
We're going to edit that image. I click on the image and remove it, then add my hero image from the media library.
Move the text boxes around to see how they look over the hero image. I think I want the text right in the middle. So I'm going to click on the two columns section and make it one column. Then I'm going to center the text. Be sure to save draft or update your post, then go and take a look at it. And it's not bad kind of a cool image that gets the point across.
Go back to edit page. I think if this word was white it would show up better. The template text is highlighted. Remove the highlight, then make the text white. I'm going to add a dark background behind the text. I'm going to add the background to this whole section. Add the background color, and pull down the opacity.
I think the logo and header are way too big. I'm going to have to make my logo smaller. Go to the customizer, click on the logo, and make it smaller. And then I'm going to add a tagline, and it's going to be, an electrician that cooks. That's not the best one, but this is going to show up when people search for your site, so it's a good thing to have a tagline in there.
