Make sure you update your PrimePress theme to the latest version before you proceed.

You need to have two pages ready to implement this.

• Homepage - A Page with welcome text or anything you wish to show first to your visitors. creating this is pretty straightforward.
• Posts page - A page to show all your blog posts. You need this because you'll lose the default blog functionality once you activate the static homepage.

1. Create the blog posts Page

Go to write Page panel in your WordPress Dashboard and create a new blank Page with the title 'Blog'. Scroll down to the Page Template options at the bottom and from the drop down list select 'Blog' and publish the Page.

2. Assign the home and blog pages

Go to Settings > Reading > Front Page displays and select 'A static page'. There are 2 more options to be selected under this. choose a page of your choice for the front page. But for the Posts page select 'blog' and save.

3. Modify the navigation menu

Open main-menu.php in your WordPress Theme Editor. Delete or comment out the marked code in the following code block (everything but the last line).

<li class="<?php if ( is_home() or is_archive() or is_single() or is_paged() or is_search() or (function_exists('is_tag') and is_tag()) )
{ ?>current_page_item<?php } else { ?>page_item<?php } ?>"><a title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?>" href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>">Home</a></li>
<?php wp_list_pages("depth=1&title_li=&sort_column={echo $pp_sort_pages}&exclude={echo $pp_exclude_pages}"); ?>

Addendum

Homepage - Any default Page you create will have the title centered at the top. You may not want this on your static homepage. Use the 'HomePage' template for that Page to get rid of this.

Page-Order - A word about the Page Order in the main navigation menu. If you prefer doing things manually, assign a number to each of the Pages in the Advanced Options and they'll be sorted in ascending order. A better and easier alternative is to use a plugin.

A few well chosen images - can add tons of visual appeal to your site, can convey more information, can make a good site a great one. so gather up all the pictures you like, putting them up in PrimePress is easy.

note: If you are already using PrimePress, please update your theme to version 1.2. It has a better image rotation solution. These instructions apply to v1.2 and on.

How-to?

I'm assuming you have your images cropped and ready. If not, crop them to a wide aspect ratio. The ideal and default width here is 920px and any bigger or smaller images will be scaled to this width. The height is calculated to a value that doesn't mess up the aspect ratio.

1. upload them to the /headers folder inside the primepress directory
2. hehe... that's it. Its done, you don't have to rename them or edit any of the theme files.

Every image in this folder will automatically be read and randomly rotated. For the record, you can upload any number of images - just let me know if you wanna put up more than a 100.

Don't want them rotating?

May be you've got a single header image ready and would like to show only that one. That's easy, just upload that one image to the /headers folder inside the theme directory and delete any other files in that folder.

A solution then... is to use a separate stylesheet for all those custom mods & tweaks we make to personalize the theme.

And that's exactly what custom.css is for. A dedicated stylesheet for all your CSS customizations. By placing all the custom styles in one place, your stylesheet will be much more organized and you'll know where everything is when you choose to change something later on.

And more importantly, it makes updating the theme a no-hassle. all you have to do is to preserve the custom.css file to keep your changes intact.

custom.css How-to ?

There are many ways to do this, but the easiest is using the Theme Editor in WordPress. Just follow the simple steps below.

1. log in to your WordPress admin panel and go to Theme Editor
2. make sure PrimePress is selected under Select theme to edit:
3. custom.css should already be open at this point, if not click on custom.css on the right side under Theme Files to open it.
4. type in your custom CSS styles here prefixing body.custom to each CSS rule.
5. If you just dabble around in CSS occasionally and are not comfortable writing the styles,
   • copy the relevent styles from the main stylesheet (style.css)
   • paste them in your custom.css
   • attach body.custom to each style and tweak away

No clue what CSS is? no problem, coming soon... are some easy instructions detailing all the customizations that can be done.

A little more clarity

For example, if you want to change the size of the site title and color of the site tagline, the CSS styles associated with these in the main stylesheet (style.css) are

.homelink {
	font-size: 35px;
	}

.description {
	color: #666666;
	}

The 1^st one governs the size of the title and 2^nd one the tagline color. Copy & paste them into your custom.css

Lets say you want to increase the title to 40px and change the tagline color to a cool blue, here's how the modified code would look like.

body.custom .homelink a {
	font-size: 40px;
	}

body.custom .description {
	color: #3399ff;
	}

As per the CSS cascading rules, a more specific & targeted style declaration wins over a lesser specific one. By adding body.custom, we are being more specific at what we want and so it overrides the default style.