5 Great Resources For Designing Your Own WordPress Theme

If you’ve seen my earlier blog post about my new theme that I’m releasing soon for WordPress.org users, you’ll know that I tweaked that theme from another website project I had worked on for another site. But sometimes, tweaking a theme to suit WordPress isn’t the easiest thing in the world (as I found out). In this blog post I’ll guide you through the best resources to start building your own WordPress theme.

 

Start With The Homeground

You’re going to be making a WordPress theme, so it seems to make sense that you start with the WordPress Documentation. Luckily enough the WordPress.org Documentation has an article guiding you through the template names and how to format your stylesheet.

Here’s the link: http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development

 

Delving Into The Templates

Yet another article on the WordPress Documentation website, this document explains how to set out some of the templates in your WordPress theme such as the Single Post page.

Here’s the link: http://codex.wordpress.org/Stepping_Into_Templates

 

Playing With Tags

And another final article on the WordPress Documentaion base is an article explaining how to use the various WordPress tags in your theme including conditional tags and loops.

Here’s the link: http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags

 

Creating A Theme From Scratch

Maybe you don’t have an existing ordinary website layout and you’re designing a theme solely for WordPress (isn’t that kind), Tutsplus has published a guide to creating your own theme from Scratch – it’s very easy to. This article will also help if you are using an already designed website template.

Here’s the link: http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/wordpress/how-to-create-a-wordpress-theme-from-scratch/

Using A Template Generator

This by far isn’t the best way to create your own WordPress themes, but if you’re in a rush to create that theme for your blog, MakeUseOf – the brilliant article base – has got a wonderful walkthrough on using a WordPress theme generator to make your themes.

Here’s the link: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/create-wordpress-theme-coding-skills-whatsoever/

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