It’s easy to customize your Managing News site so that it has a unique look and feel. To demonstrate this I’ve pulled together four different color schemes with different logos and backgrounds and will walk through the changes I made and why I made certain design decisions. All of this is generalizable to any site, and all of the changes can be made through “Theme settings” in the Admin menu.

In the above image I’ve changed the background, foreground, header, and map background colors from an out of the box Managing News site. I also dropped in a custom logo and wallpaper into the site — which you can do with a single click.

It takes about three minutes to go from the default look to one of these customized themes. Here are some notes on why I chose these design elements. I hope these details will help you in modifying the look of your Managing News site.

The default World Glass map tileset is transparent white, so it is important to use a background color that will let the tiles show up clearly. The darker the background color is, the higher the contrast is in the map.

I suggest using a dark color for the header too to make a good contrast between the header and the content area directly below the header. However, the theme works with any header color because the top navigation menu items switch to black when you pass a lightness threshold, keeping them legible no matter what color you choose.

In addition to adding a custom logo, I dropped in a custom background image for this example. The image I used is 20% opaque black so it will work with a wide range of background colors, as long as they aren’t too dark. The default cityscape background image is similarly transparent.

You can customize your site like this by going to “Theme settings” in the Admin menu, and to change the site’s colors go to yoursiteurl.com/admin/build/themes/settings/jake. From here you can changes colors throughout the site by using the color picker or typing in RGB hex codes.

You can download the latest version of Managing News — 1.1 — from managingnews.com and read about its new features in Will’s blog post.