Customizing themes

I've never met a person yet that installed a theme and was ready to launch their Magento store without wanting or even needing changes made to the store design. It's natural, as a store needs to have its own personality and its own brand. In this section, we hope to uncover many of the mysteries of how Magento controls a store's look and feel through layered components that, once you understand how they work together, will give you a tremendous ability to make your Magento store a unique, productive online retail destination.

Tip

Finding CSS

While you can view the source code of a webpage in any browser, there are better ways of identifying not only the HTML elements of a page, but the exact CSS style(s) that are controlling how that component appears.

For Firefox browsers, you can install the Firebug plugin (http://getfirebug.com). For Safari and Chrome users, this functionality is included with the browser. Another great tool for Firefox users is the Web developer add...