Customization

Blaskan is a theme built around a set of deliberate defaults. Most customization decisions involve either accepting those defaults or replacing them with something that serves your site's specific content and audience better. This page covers the major customization areas: header choices, menu structure, archive density, sidebar widgets, featured images, and home page sections. It also covers the most common way that customization degrades readability, and how to avoid it. The search intent here covers first-time configuration and return visits from people who have the theme running and want to go further. This guide is based on working with content-heavy WordPress blogs for over a decade, where readability and layout stability matter more than visual novelty.

Header Choices

The header is the most immediately visible part of any WordPress theme. In Blaskan, it contains the site title or logo and the primary navigation. Configuration happens through the WordPress Customizer under Site Identity and Header settings.

The site identity section allows you to upload a custom logo image. If you upload one, it replaces the text-based site title in the header. If you do not upload a logo, the site title text is displayed using the theme's header font styles. Both configurations work. The text-based header has the advantage of remaining perfectly readable at all viewport widths without requiring separate image assets for different screen densities.

If you upload a custom logo, the height of the image matters. Tall logo images increase the total header height, which pushes content further down the page. A logo that is 60 to 80 pixels tall works well in the Blaskan header at desktop widths. Taller logos are not technically broken, but they shift the visual weight of the page toward the header in a way that most blog layouts do not benefit from.

The header background color and link colors are configurable through the Customizer. Changes are reflected immediately in the live preview. When modifying these values, check that the resulting colors maintain sufficient contrast with each other and with the header text. A header with low-contrast navigation links degrades usability and fails accessibility standards.

For detailed guidance on logo sizing, site title display options, and the interaction between header height and navigation placement, see the header logo and menu behavior documentation.

Menu Structure

Blaskan registers one primary navigation location in the header. The navigation displays as a horizontal list at desktop widths and collapses into a toggle-based vertical list at mobile widths. Menu configuration happens in Appearance > Menus or in the Navigation section of the Customizer.

Flat menus, where all items are top-level links without submenus, work well in the Blaskan header. Items are evenly spaced and scale cleanly across the available header width. If your navigation has more than six or seven top-level items, the horizontal menu will begin to crowd at mid-range viewport widths, before the breakpoint at which the mobile menu takes over.

Submenus are supported at one level of depth. Top-level items with children display a drop-down on hover at desktop widths and an in-line expansion at mobile widths. Menu nesting beyond one level is not reliably styled by the default theme CSS and is not a recommended configuration.

Menu item label length has a direct effect on the header layout. Short labels like "About," "Documentation," and "Contact" fit comfortably. Longer labels compress the available space for other items and can push items to a second line at certain viewport widths before the mobile breakpoint. Keep navigation labels short and specific.

The menus and interaction documentation covers keyboard interaction patterns for the navigation, how drop-down behavior is triggered and closed, and what the mobile menu experience looks like for keyboard and touch users.

Archive Density

Archive density is the amount of visual and textual information each post card displays in the archive stream. Blaskan's default archive configuration shows a featured image (if present), the post title, a meta row with date and author, an excerpt, and a read more link. This is a medium-density archive.

Increasing density means showing more per card. Adding categories to the meta row, lengthening excerpts, or displaying additional post metadata increases density. Higher density makes individual cards more informative, but it slows down the scanning rhythm of the archive. Readers who are browsing rather than searching are more likely to disengage before reaching posts further down the page.

Reducing density means showing less per card. Removing excerpts and displaying only the title and featured image creates a lower-density, more visual archive. This works well for photography-focused blogs or for sites where post titles are descriptive enough to stand without excerpts. It works less well for text-focused blogs where titles alone do not give readers enough information to make a click decision.

The right density depends on your content type and how your audience uses the archive. For most text-focused WordPress blogs, the Blaskan default is a reasonable starting point. Excerpt length is controlled in WordPress Settings > Reading. Longer excerpts increase archive card height. Shorter excerpts reduce it.

The featured images, excerpts, and archive rhythm documentation covers archive layout in detail, including what happens when featured image use is inconsistent across posts.

Widgets and Sidebar Control

The Blaskan sidebar is configured through Appearance > Widgets by adding widgets to the Sidebar widget area. At desktop widths, these widgets appear in the right column alongside the content. At mobile widths, the sidebar stacks below the main content.

Widget selection affects both the visual density of the sidebar and its usefulness to visitors. A sidebar with a search box, a short recent posts list, and a categories list is functional and light. A sidebar with a search box, recent posts, recent comments, categories, tags, a monthly archives list, a text widget, and a social links block is dense. Dense sidebars push important widgets below the fold on shorter pages and create visual competition with the content column.

Blaskan does not enforce a widget count limit. You can add as many widgets as you choose. But the visual balance of the two-column layout is sensitive to sidebar length. When the sidebar is significantly longer than the main content on pages with short content (category landing pages, tag archives with few posts, static pages with brief text), the layout looks visually unbalanced. A sidebar that is approximately equal in height to the main content column, or shorter, produces the best result.

Widgets that require a plugin are fine to use once that plugin is installed and active. Be aware that visitors who see the sidebar before the plugin is active, or after it is deactivated, will see an empty widget space or a plugin-required notice depending on the widget's fallback behavior.

Removing the sidebar on specific post types or pages requires either selecting a full-width page template (available for individual pages through the Page Attributes panel) or creating a template override in a child theme. For template overrides, see the child theme basics documentation.

Featured Images

Featured images in Blaskan appear at the top of single posts and within archive post cards. They are optional on every post. Posts without a featured image display cleanly without a placeholder image substituted.

If you use featured images, consistent dimensions produce a better archive layout. When all featured images share the same aspect ratio, the archive cards align with consistent image heights and the stream has a clear visual rhythm. When featured image dimensions vary significantly from post to post, the archive has an irregular rhythm. This is not a broken layout, but it is a less polished one that can make the archive look unfinished.

Blaskan constrains featured images to the content column width. Images wider than the column are scaled down to fit. Images narrower than the column are not stretched. A very small image in an archive card will appear at its native dimensions, which may produce an inconsistently small image against cards that display full-width featured images. The recommended minimum width for Blaskan featured images is 1200 pixels, which ensures coverage of the full content column width at all viewport sizes.

Image file size also matters. Large image files slow page load times regardless of how well the layout handles them visually. WordPress generates multiple image sizes on upload. Confirm that your featured image dimensions are close to what Blaskan actually displays rather than uploading very large originals and relying entirely on WordPress's resize to handle the output size.

Home Page Sections

By default, Blaskan displays the blog post stream on the front page. This is standard WordPress behavior and the right choice for most content-focused blogs. The front page and the archive are the same page. All published posts appear in reverse chronological order.

For sites that need a different front page structure, WordPress supports setting a static page as the front page and a separate page as the blog posts index. This is configured in Settings > Reading. When using a static front page, the Blaskan static page template applies, which includes the sidebar. If you want a full-width layout for a static front page, that requires a page template override in a child theme.

For content-heavy blogs where the front page is the primary discovery surface for posts, keeping the blog stream as the front page is usually the right call. A static front page adds a navigation step between the visitor and the content.

The homepage structure for content-heavy blogs documentation covers the tradeoffs in detail, including when a static front page adds genuine value and what the layout implications are for both options.

To see Blaskan layout components in isolation before committing to a configuration, the pattern bench shows individual layout patterns outside the full page context.

Keeping the Theme Readable After Customization

The most common way Blaskan customizations reduce readability is through three types of changes: font size reduction to fit more content on screen, spacing reduction to bring elements closer together, and color changes that reduce contrast without the change being obvious during development.

Font size below the default value reduces reading speed and increases fatigue over longer reading sessions. The gain from fitting more content above the fold is rarely worth the cost in reading comfort. If the default font size feels large, consider whether the perceived problem is actually a content density or layout issue rather than a typography issue.

Reducing paragraph spacing or heading margins to compress more content into the visible area is a common customization impulse. In practice, compressed spacing makes text blocks harder to scan. The eye needs whitespace to separate distinct content elements. Removing that whitespace creates density that slows readers down rather than helping them move through the content efficiently.

Color changes that reduce contrast are the hardest to notice during development, because you are evaluating them at your own screen brightness and in your own ambient light conditions. What looks readable during development may fail at reduced brightness or in bright ambient light. Test any modified color values against the WCAG 4.5:1 threshold using a contrast checker. Do not rely on visual assessment alone.

The documentation hub covers both accessibility and responsive layout in depth. Both are relevant when customization decisions have downstream effects on the theme's structural behavior.