when I'm trying to create a menu there aren't any pages showing up for me to include!

A page won't be available in Appearance > Menus if it's a draft or if it's private: it has to be published and public. If you're working on the site, make the site private (in Settings > Reading), not the pages.

If you are not successful when searching there is a link for the specific Premium Theme support forum for your theme under Appearance -> Themes in your blog’s Dashboard, but do note that the premium theme must be active and you must be signed in as the user who purchased it in order to see it and post to it.

With the premium customization you do have the option to now edit the CSS of the theme. Add the following code to the theme CSS:

#container {
    background: none !important;
}

Screen shot of the CSS edit.

Does anyone know how I can change the colour or make the content box transparent?

Thanks!

M

The following example will hide the "Read Article →" block that appears for recent articles on hover on the Oxygen theme Showcase page template:

.hentry:hover a.read-more {
	display: none;
}

My question is simple: I need to either remove or customise the 'read article' link that by default appears when you hover over a post on Oxygen theme.

I have removed the featured picture on each post and I think that has messed up the alignment of the 'read article' link -- it does not appear in line with each post and the space-alignment has gone all haywire. (I might just prefer deleting the link in its entirety if the space alignment is complicated.)

Can someone please help?

Thanks a ton in advance. :)

At last the penny has dropped, thank you :)

I have now compared the previous CSS versions and have a handle on the changes made (and noted them!) and seen how these change using the Preview mode when editing the CSS.

Thanks for your patience and answering my questions. Have a great weekend!

At the moment all I need to do is find out exactly how much has been changed and then make the menu colour change needed.

I'm planning to change the to a new Theme completely going forward in a couple of months time. I think that will be the time to customise the CSS in the way you suggested earlier.

That's why I was also asking if I can have a test blog within the current customization option without having to pay for an extra one. Do you know if I can do this?

In CSS, any theme related images will have relative links (Example: /images/image.jpg) rather than absolute links (Example: http://blogname.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/image.jpg). Since the custom CSS is saved in a different location that means the relative links are broken and image elements in the theme will disappear. With 2010, this isn't much of a problem since it has few image elements in the design, but for other themes, this can be a good sized problem.

I inherited the customisation, so I didn't copy the stylesheet into the editor.

I'm completely new to customisation and I have no documentation on what my predecessor did. Luckily they only made changes 18 times, so I can at least reconstruct what they've changed so far using the compare version functions.

What kind of problems are there with having the entire stylesheet in the editor?

The other thing I notice is that you have copied and pasted the entire stylesheet into the editor. This can cause you problems. What you want to do is to add only the selectors and specific declarations that you are adding or changing. Anything that is not changing should not be put into your custom CSS.

Thanks :)

I've gone into the Appearance > Themes and selected the customise option.

I've then looked at the colour palette which is displayed for the Colors and Background option.

The colour shown for the menu on the palette is black, not the orange which appears on the Menu actually displayed on the blog.

If I select another colour and drag it to the Menu colour on the palette, the colour of the Menu does not change to my colour selection.

Therefore, I'm wondering if the Menu colour was customized in a different way?

The second option looks like a good one for the small changes I need to do now.

I'm also looking at doing some significant changes which will take several days and so I also need a test blog to do these. I know I can just create a new blog as my test blog, but how do I link it in with the blog I'm supporting so I can also use the customisation option already paid for? This is assuming I can do that of course, or do I need to pay a second customisation fee?

You can also do much of it with the Customizer feature here and not need a test blog: http://en.support.wordpress.com/customizer/ .

Both options work and it just depends on what you feel comfortable with.

I now need to use the customisation functionality myself for the first time.

I'm worried about doing this straight into the blog when others are using it. Am I allowed to set up a test blog which can also use the customisation facilities, or do I need to pay another customisation fee? If I can have a test blog within the current customisation agreement, how do I set this up?

The blog currently the colour of the Menu bar changed to orange instead of the usual black. However, when I go into customisation, the menu still seems to have the colour black selected when I look at the colours options. Is this the correct place to change this colour, or do I need to do this elsewhere?

As far as I can tell the previous blogger hasn't used the Menu Customisation option, but is using the Pages functionality to determine which Pages (and sub-pages) appear where on the Menu bar.

Thanks very much for your help!

Is there a better way to identify which elements of the CSS file apply to the different elements of the page?

Using the web inspector by right-clicking and selecting "Inspect Element" is the best thing in my opinion. It will highlight the HTML you clicked on and also show all of the CSS rules that apply to that thing. If you keep clicking on different elements in the panel on the left, the CSS will keep updating on the right. When you're starting out, it's useful to adjust the CSS right inside the panel and then just copy out the updated CSS and paste it into your Appearance → Custom Design → CSS editor.

Here is a more in depth tutorial about the web inspector from the Chrome developers. Check out the CSS Styles section:
https://developers.google.com/chrome-developer-tools/docs/elements

The CSS file for Twenty Ten seems massive with some things being defined in several ways. Is this typical of themes? Or are there some themes that are much simpler?

Twenty Ten was designed with best practices in mind. It may seem like a lot because it's taking every possible scenario of the content into account. That's why using the web inspector to just look at CSS for one area at a time makes it a little easer to start figuring out what's happening with all of it. I think the Twenty Ten CSS is pretty typical. Of course, it varies. Here is the CSS for two different themes so you can compare:

This is Twenty Ten's stylesheet:
https://s1.wp.com/wp-content/themes/pub/sandbox-162/style.css?m=1323834012g&minify=false

This is the stylesheet for the Sandbox theme:
https://s1.wp.com/wp-content/themes/pub/sandbox-162/style.css?m=1323834012g&minify=false

It's simpler, but it's designed as a blank slate for someone to customize themselves so it doesn't have rules for a lot of stuff and the starting point of the theme looks pretty plain: http://sandbox162demo.wordpress.com/

For some people, it's easier to start with a stylesheet like Twenty Ten because you can see how something was styled, take that, and adjust it. With the Sandbox theme, you have to come up with the CSS to style everything on your own. It's up to you to decide which approach works best for you.