What’s a Child Theme and why do I want one?

You’ve installed WordPress and a gorgeous theme, however you just want a different logo height or maybe a different page background color and these options are not available via the Customizer.  You could make these changes within the theme files and all would work.  However, when your theme gets an update all the changes you made will be overwritten and so wiped out.  This leaves you with the impossible choice of either not keeping your theme up to date (a huge security risk and may also lead to the theme being incompatible with some of your plugins) or lose your customizations.

Using a Child Theme is the solution to this.

A Child Theme inherits the functionality and styling of its parent.  You can then extend the parent theme by using the Child Theme to add or change styling, functions, page and post templates.

A Child Theme is the best way to modify your current theme.

Quite often a theme author with provide you with a Child theme.  Both the Parent and the Child theme should be installed in your WordPress framework with the Child theme being the active theme.  If your theme author doesn’t supply one you can either build one yourself or use a plugin to create one for you.  If that seems a little too time consuming just contact me and I’d be happy to help!