(Read Part 2 first?)

Okay, so I’m sitting in front of my laptop with a mug of of my good ol’ hot drink, looking at the two-column CSS layout I’ve just selected for my new Blog of The Rugrats site. My next step was to choose a colour scheme for the theme. You can look for sites that list out some colour combinations you can use, such as the choices that can be found at ColorCombos.com, or do it the way I did, which was to use the search engine to look for recommendations on the best colour combinations specifically for children- and kids-related web site. I eventually found a rec that said green and purple seems to be a very attractive combination for children’s web site, so I stuck with it. I also browsed around Template Monster and other blog and template directory sites and look at children’s web site sets to get more inspiration. I found a few sites I liked, especially one Blogger-based design that has some sticky-tape concept added to it, which I liked. I kept those ideas in mind or just made a quick jot in my handy dandy notebook.

Next, I went looking for some simple yet still unique graphics to use, and my favourite place to find free graphics is at Microsoft Office’s Clip Art Library. Armed with a collection of potential clip arts now stored in my clip art library, I opened my Adobe Photoshop program, created a 800×600 sized canvas and did my layout testing there first, before splicing the necessary graphics for use in Microsoft FrontPage.

TBC.

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(Read Part 1 first?)

Once I’ve successfully customized the default WP Kubrick theme and learned how the WordPress template tagging basically works, I was now bold enough to create a theme from the ground up, so to speak, and my Blog of Rugrats project gave me a reason to work on one.

I really wanted to build a theme from scratch and finish it in the shortest time possible. One thing determined how fast I can develop one, and that is my little know-how on CSS. Thus, I decided to cheat. I played around with WordPress Theme Generator, hoping that I can generate the layout that I wanted and just edit the resulting CSS file after that. But you know what? I found that editing the file was a lot more confusing than I expected. At the end, I decided to forget the theme generator. Instead, I did a keyword search on CSS two-column layouts, and saw a very good collection of two- and three-column CSS templates at Dynamic Drive CSS Library. I went with the fluid left, fixed right column layout, then started to edit it using my favourite HTML editor, Microsoft FrontPage (Do I hear a few people laughing out there? I make money training people to use FrontPage, and I earned my Microsoft Certified Professional thanks to FrontPage, OK?).

(Read Part 3 for the continuation)

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I think I finally got the knack for creating WordPress themes and templates, so I felt like sharing my experience as well as listing the resources that I use to learn how to create my very own WordPress themes (actually, it’s also a part of my effort to fulfill the One Page A Day challenge I took recently, so I’m also breaking this post into three parts). Who knows, maybe it would inspire those of us interested in doing your very own WordPress theme but don’t know where to start.

I started dabbling with WordPress theme when I wanted to modify the default Kubrick theme and insert my own WebGrrrl.net header graphic. At the same time, I was learning the basics of using WordPress Template Tags, which is to this day a site I always refer to when building my theme. At this time, a little bit of CSS knowledge is also useful to have, because of the Kubrick theme’s heavy reliance on it.

I realized, once I was done with changing the header graphic, that at the end I don’t really have to know programming to modify a WordPress theme, but only the motivation and the guts to do those changes (I know some of us are very hesitant to edit a WordPress theme for fear of breaking the design, but as Nike said — just do it). I also realized that sandboxing is a very, very, very good thing

(Read Part 2 for the continuation)

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