I Will Design A WordPress Theme

I have been looking around for a theme for WordPress websites. Since i want to use wordpress for as a CMS I have not got the real thing I really need. The one thing that is most abudant when using wordpress os the manay themes that can be used and they are all free. How does it feel to create a really eye ctaching wordpress theme? I was at first afraid of taking up the tasmk of creating my own theme and thus I have spent a lot of time going round looking for a theme.

Just yesterday I went through the files of the default theme and funny enough the code was so readable and simplistic and then it came to my realization the reason why many wordpress themes are so easily available: simplicity. You do not have to have great Designing Skills to create your own look for your wordpress site, you only need to know some PHP, some CSSand definitely good XHTML.

The problem with many designers at times is lack of imagination not lack of skill. Some know how in Photoshop can enable you to transform almost any good looking picture to the skin of a website.

The layouts on many wordpress powered template sites is the simple flow of tasks. The flow may be:

JPG to PSD.

Here a good photo is made into a website screenshot using Photoshop. This would be the work of a Graphic Designer.

Someone with knowledge of layers, Brushes, Effects in Photoshop.

PSD to XHTML.

At this stage we already have a static photo of the website. But it is not functional we can load it into a browser and see how it is rendered. It looks nice but it is not editable or clickable. This step is very crucial. The person at this stage should know the right tools to use. mostly i would advice him/her to use a picture manager which can edit a bunch of images at a time. This person cuts up the screenshot into various areas and replaces the static text with HTML text. He replaces the large image with small bits which can be repeated on the screen to give the same impression as the graphic. This stage also involves optimization where the images are compressed for least load time and best view on screen. This task is very major it can make the designer proud or embarrased based on the result.

XHTML to Theme

This is the final stage in the design process. The person working at this level needs much more that his/her predecessors. An in depth knowledge of the CMS being themed is very crucial. In wordpress this designer should know about posts, widgets, theme options, single posts,Error 404 pages,Dynamic sidebar, Search engine Optimization, Javascript and CSS. This stage when done professionally results in what you can term as a masterpiece.

The stages above all vary in complexity. You would find that some stages are more expensive than others. There are numerous sites that can offer you screenshots of websites as JPG files. Well they give you this for free as they do know that the task of making the JPG file an XHTML site is very complex and tiring.

The second stage is more difficult and not many sites will do this for free. Again this stage gives you more control on the end product so I think it is very crucial for one to master this stage. Use of image areas is far outdated. Good use of CSS can make the site easy to access and very appealing. Good scripting is also crucial at this stage if you can use unobtrusive JavaScript or JQuery or MooTools it is advisable. You can place slideshows and Ajax functions at this stage, in fact I would prefer the scripts being introduced at this stage as later on the developer will only have to update the sources of data to make the JavaScript effects dynamic and editable from the backend of the CMS.

With a good workout on stage two you are ready for stage three. You should be able to map the new template XHTML files to an existing theme by matching the classes and other attributes and modifying the PHP function calls to suit your new theme. In fact if the stage two designer used a set of class names that are used in the CMS default theme file it may make your work at stage three much easier.

Find More Resources to start you off:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Stepping_Into_Templates

Video Tutorial.

Happy Blogging.

Advertisement