What is the best way to customize the appearance of a box, such as changing the rounded border to straight edge border and background color of the search box to blue?
 
What is the best way to customize the content of a box, such as changing the text "Your shopping cart is empty!" to "Your basket is empty!"?
 
Thanks for your help!

The customization of the messages like "your basket is empty" is done in the messages part of the admin in System -->> System static messages.
 
Other stuff not sure.

Hi Alechhe,
 
Its surprisingly easy. All the blocks have a css class defined in the form of bl_search, bl_subscribe etc etc.
 
All you do is define a css entry for the elements within this class. eg the top menu is defined by titletopTopLeft, titletopTopCenter & titletopTopRight
 
so
 
.bl_search titleTopLeft {
 
background:transparent url(../images/paella2/left.gif) no-repeat scroll left top;
border:0px solid #999999;
width:31px;
}
 
would control the lefthand part of the menu heading.
 
My advice is to use Firefox as a browser and download the firebug extension. This allows you to see the css code in action - just use "Inspect". It will even allow you to temporarily change the css styles - so you can dynamically play around with margins, fonts, etc etc and see instantly how it effect your design.
 
Regards
 
 
Kevin