Create Your Own WordPress Theme

WordPress is maybe the blogging platform with more themes and designs available at the moment, this means that you have a great range of options to choose from for your blog. Here in Blogger Lounge I´ve posted some resources where you can find lots of themes for your WP blog. Although there are many good themes out there you can always design one of your own and use it in your blog. Every successful blog has to have its own design with your own personal touch, why? Because the design of a blog is part of its brand and it is part of its style too. When you have a unique theme that no one else has, your blog looks more important and more reliable, your readers are going to be more confident and they are going to develop certain loyalty to your blog, because they´ll feel that they are reading a gret blog ,different than others.

I designed the theme for Blogger Lounge one month ago based on a theme designed by David Harreman, it was a css template called “RedBusiness” I converted it for WordPress using a technique explained by Max Limpag on his blog The Cybercafe Experiments. Max has a great posts called: “How to create a WordPress theme: A guide for the design-challenged non-geek” where he explains with detail how to create your own design from scratch. Here is a small fragment of his post.

“I’ve gone through a lot of WordPress themes, customizing one after another. I decided to simplify my blog design after buttons and stuff that depended on other services and servers delayed loading of my blog pages. I also thought that the clutter of having all these buttons and stuff was getting in the way of the content, and the AdSense clicks. My current minimalist design proves me right on this one. I found turning a CSS-based design into WordPress theme to be easy. I am not a geek and I do not have formal training on CSS, HTML or PHP. What I did was I read up on CSS in sites such as MaxDesign. I also went through the WordPress Codex, reading about template tags and files and while I was porting the theme, I went through the template files of themes like K2 and Phoenixrealm to look at how its coders did things.”

When I first read this post I thought it was very difficult to design a theme for WP, but after a while and after a little bit of practice I can assure you that it is very easy, of course you have to be creative, Max also has a post on his blog called “How to edit WordPress themes using Dreamweaver” , give it a look. Don´t be afraid and try, there is nothing to lose.

Comments

Advertisement