Make your own WordPress Theme. Anyone can do it, really!

Posted in Resources , Web Designing

“Can I make a wordpress theme myself?” Here’s my answer to your million dollar question- YES, you CAN. A lot of people out there try to make a wordpress theme on their own, and guess what, most of them fail. Why? Not because the don’t have talents or time, it’s just because they don’t know the route; some quit after a bad start, some just can’t follow. and some just don’t have the patience, but most of them fail because they don’t know where to start and how to follow.

 

I’ve been a WordPress Theme Designer myself for quite some time now and in the spirit of honesty, I don’t dare to call myself a WordPress theme designer, not yet. When you’re into web designing, there is no getting to the point where the learning part ends. And what most people fail to to understand, or may be get a grip of is that you have to create at the same time you learn, and if you can’t do that, you’ll always end up learning.

 

It’s not really a healthy policy to think about finishing learning first and then start applying. Let me tell you what, it’s not only a bad way of starting something, it’s the most miserable policy from what there is no escape until you start applying what you’ve learned and start creating! So start creating, create your very own wordpress theme all by yourself! And don’t worry, I’ll always be here to help. I’m putting up this list of things and links that are gonna show you how to make a wordpress theme from scratch in no time. You’ll also find things that will help you take your theme a step further, help you make the kind of theme that you only dreamed of all this time! I’ll separate the list in two sections, the first one will help you create a basic theme and the second section will help you dig in a little deeper and create stuff like featured post, automatic thumbnails and such.

 

Basic Theme Designing Section

 

1. WordPress Codex

The first step of learning wordpress theme designing is to understand how a wordpress theme works. Of course you can skip this part and start designing your very first theme right away, but if you want your skill to last long and if you want to understand every part of a theme while you create it, you’ll sure want to check out the official WordPress documentation on Blog Design and Layout.

 

Here’s the Link

 

2. WPDesigner.com PDF Tutorial

WPDesigner.com was one of the very first websites to provide tutorials on wordpress. And I must say that they helped me a big deal when I first started designing wordpress themes. They’ve put up a great tutorial on creating wordpress themes from scratch which you can download in PDF format for free. You really don’t want to miss something that contains-

 

a. Design instructions.

b. A folder of images (step-by-step screenshots)

c. A PSD file for you to mess around with.

 

Here’s the Download Link

 

3. Tutorial by Themetaion.com (Intermediate)

If you’ve finished designing your very first wordpress theme by now and want to move on to creating a new one that you could actually use on our website, then you probably want to go through this tutorial. Not only does it include a cool PSD layout for free, it also tells you how to turn the PSD file into a CSS/XHTML WordPress theme.It’s one of the best tutorial ever! It even includes a video to show you how to slice a PSD file so that you can use them on your theme via CSS and XHTML.

 

Here’s the Link.

 

Advanced Theme Designing Section

 

1. Adding Thumbnails to your posts

Once you’re done playing with the tutorials given here and created a couple of themes already, you’re definitely in the mood of taking your theme to a next level and spice up the look of your theme a little. And one good way of doing is to make your theme show thumbnail on every post on your index page.

 

You probably have came across hundreds of sites that has thumbnails on every post, those little images right beside the content part, right? Well, if you have no idea what I’m talking about then go to the homepage of my site and you’ll find that some posts have small images right below the post titles, these are thumbnails, scaled down versions of larger images. You could either use it too make a post look eye catchy or to make clear what a post is about. Of course you can do this manually by adding an image to post while you’re writing one, but that would require you to resize it first and then post it. There’s an easy way around it though, you could use the built-in custom fields feature in wordpress to add automatically resized thumbnails on every single post! Want to know how? Here’s a list of websites that have step-by-step tutorials on how you could easily add thumbnails to your posts.

 

1. Tutorial by Justintadlock.com

 

2. Tutorial by Tutorial9.com

 

3. Tutorial by WordPressGarage.com

 

2. Creating a Featured Post Section

Another way of spicing up your wordpress theme is to create a Featured Post section. Ever noticed it on someone’s site? Well it’s a section that you could add to the top part of your theme to feature a post. Say you just created a great post and you want it to appear right at the top for 4/5 days. We all know that every time we publish a new post, the older one is moved to the bottom of the new post, right? So what’s the easiest way of keeping a post above your other post as long as you want? The answer is simple, just create a featured post section and you’re done! Refer to any of the following links if you want to know how you could do it.

 

1. An easy to understand tutorial at NetTuts.com

 

2. Another one by TechYard.net

 

3. And another one by GabeDiaz.com (pretty advance one)

 

3. Using Plugins

Another great of way making a theme more attractive and increasing the usability of a theme at the same time is to use plugins on your theme. And the best part about WordPress plugins is that they are FREE! If you don’t want to go through the stuff I just listed in the Advanced Theme Designing section, then you’d probably prefer plugins. Here’s a link to a very good tutorial that will teach you how you could find, install and configure a WordPress plugin.

 

How to install configure and use wordpress plugins by Lorelle

 

And here’s a link to a post that I wrote just last week, you’ll find some real good plugins on the list for your site, check it out if your interested.

 

Scripts and WordPress Plugins a blogger must know about

::::::::Updates #1::::::::

 

4. Displaying Author Pic and Bio in WordPress without Gravatar

A well put and easy to follow tutorial by GabeDiaz, showing how you can Display Author pic and bio in your wordpress blog without the help of Gravatar. It’s pretty handy when your site has more than one author. He has several other tutorials on WordPress, visit his site for tutorials and tips.

 

Here’s the Link to his tutorial

 

That’s it for now, I really intend to keep updating this post as much as I can. Stuff like Free themes, Inspiration gallery will be added very soon. So don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS feed if you want to stay updated.