Out Of The Box Styling Options

[Russell H.]

We've included a lot of simple "point-&-click" styling options in VORTEX that will in and of themselves allow you to radically change the look and feel of your websites. If you take the time to work with all the various controls and seek out some personalized graphics then the end result will be WELL worth the while.

The purpose of this thread is to give a broad overview of the various options which are all covered separately in other threads in this forum.

Outside of the built in controls, you can further customize the stylesheet yourself provided that you have the skills to do that. Just make sure to make a backup of your site and specifically save the default version of the style.css file so you have a base standard to fall back on if required.

The areas that you can control very simply without any html or CSS coding knowledge are;

HEADER: 1) Top Thin Banner: choose background color, special effect font texts, size of text, html responsive, height flexibility. Has the ability to be toggled on or off (display/hide)
2) Main Header: Choose either *custom text headlines or graphic header/logo, *CSS/gradient color backgrounds or *graphic backgrounds, *header/page separator line gradient color or toggle on/off, *custom header widget for separate pages.

MENU TABS: You can choose *menu tab gradient (or solid) backgrounds, *tab border colors, *font style & size, text hover and click colors, and *toggle menu tabs on or off for any page! NOTE: when you choose fonts that are larger and a larger font size itself then this will naturally expand the size of the menu tab. This can be good when trying to create a larger type menu tab or for menus where there is a lot of navigation info and you need to fit in a lot of listed pages.

BOXED or WIDE LAYOUT: you have the option to toggle between boxed and wide layouts. Also can choose to have shadowed edges in boxed mode. You can play around with this a bit. Using either the CSS background colors or a graphic background can give a really distinct appearance when using boxed mode. Similar controls in wide mode just makes it so simpler to give all your sites a distinctive appearance!

LINK COLORS: There is a site-wide CSS control (found in Control Panel/General Tab) to allow you to select the colors of links for the site. This is extremely handy and important when creating certain types of site appearance styles because you can make your links match the site or stand out against light or dark backgrounds.

BODY BACKGROUNDS: This is the background control for the main page (container). You can choose either a solid color or a specific graphic image of your own and then decide whether to have it repeating horizontally, vertically or both!

MAIN FEATURED PANEL BACKGROUNDS: Here you have gradient color selector control and also can choose graphic image backgrounds either from the built in library (can be changed and added to) or via an on-the-fly image file uploader.

DEFAULT PAGE BACKGROUND COLOR: This is the background color control for all you main pages (and posts). It means that you can either have a default background as set by the featured panel gradient control or choose an entirely separate color of choice for contrast.

FEATURED TEXT BOX BACKGROUNDS: here you can choose between a solid background color (and border color) or use any graphic image uploaded from the control panel.

CTA/ARROW/BOX: There are 42 different default types of arrow and box backgrounds (21 colors in arrow and square) plus a clear background to allow text only to show. You can add or remove these backgrounds via FTP or cPanel should you wish to use your own distinctive styles.
Special Effect Fonts in selectable sizes and colors can be used and you can even choose the color of the text shadow effect.

FEATURED SIDEPANEL: Use the built in color gradient control to create distinctive color effects

SIDEBAR: Choose any color for the standard and featured sidebars and can control the color opacity from 0 to 100%. This is great when using a custom image background for the main featured panel and then being able to display widget content and allowing the image background to show through a little or have it completely obscured.
Also, you can choose the sidebar widget title color so that it stands out.

HTML ROTATOR: You can choose the backgound color and border color and you can also choose to show/not-show the html rotator (quotes box). Furthermore you can use shortcode [wplb-quoterotator] to display the html rotator in the "featured text" panel or anywhere else including a widget in the sidebar.