Responsive Theme

I am looking to turn off the reply option on my responsive theme blog.

From your WordPress admin dashboard, go to Settings > Discussion and uncheck the box that’s labeled Allow people to post comments on new articles.

Also can I change the color/style of text in html in the widget area

Yes, but you should learn to use a web debugging tool like Firebug (a free extension for Firefox) or Chrome Developer Tools, which comes built-in with Chrome. Once you figure out what CSS to use, you can add it through the Responsive theme’s custom CSS option: go to Appearance > Theme Options, expand the CSS Styles section, and enter your CSS rules in the Custom CSS Styles field. If you do not understand CSS, there is a good tutorial here.

Thanks for the reply I tried to turn off the replies by going through dashboard – settings > discussion and turning off allow people to post comments but it hasn’t seem to have any affect.

Are you talking about new posts/pages or existing posts/pages? That option should turn off comments for any new posts or pages that you write. If you want to turn them off for your existing posts:

1. From your admin dashboard, go to Posts > All Posts
2. If not all of your posts are displayed on a single page, click the Screen Options tab in the upper right corner and enter a number that’s large enough to either display all of your posts or a workable number of posts on the screen (maybe 100). This will help reduce the number of edits that you’ll have to do below. Click Apply.
3. From the Bulk Actions drop down list, select Edit.
4. Mark the checkbox next to the word Title. This will select all of the posts on the page.
5. Click the Apply button.
6. The Bulk Edit section will open up. In the Comments dropdown, select Do not allow.
7. Click the Update button.

This will remove the comment dialog from the posts that were listed on the page. If you have other pages of posts, continue with the other pages and repeat steps 3-7. If you want to remove comments from pages as well, repeat the above after going to Pages > All Pages.