WordPress Theme Design

by Tessa Blakeley Silver

Theme design can be approached from two angles. The first is simplicity; sometimes it suits the client and/or the site to go as bare-bones as possible. In that case, it's quick and easy to take a very basic, pre-made theme and modify it. The second is "Unique and Beautiful". Occasionally, the site's theme needs to be created from scratch so that everything displayed caters to the specific kind of content the site offers. This book is going to take you through the Unique and Beautiful route with the idea that once you know how to create a theme from scratch, you'll be more apt at understanding what to look for in other WordPress themes. This book can be used by WordPress users or visual designers (with no server-side scripting or programming experience) who are used to working with the common industry-standard tools like PhotoShop and Dreamweaver or other popular graphic, HTML, and text editors. Regardless of your web development skill-set or level, you'll be walked through the clear, step-by-step instructions, but familiarity with a broad range of web development skills and WordPress know-how will allow you to gain maximum benefit from this book.

Genres: Website Design, Education, Nonfiction

224 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Chad · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book does a decent job teaching WordPress theme design. It walks you through wireframing, writing the HTML and CSS, and creating graphics, then building a WordPress theme from those pieces.

It’s mostly WordPress-specific, addressing the WordPress Loop, template files, template tags, widgets, and plugins. However, many other general web design topics are included, such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP.

It was published May 2008, so it’s written for WordPress 2.5, and some of the info is outdated. Understandably, many other references to “current” web design technology and trends are dated. There are several hacks for dealing with Internet Explorer 6, which are fortunately not as necessary with more standards-compliant versions of Internet Explorer 8 and 9. However, most of the examples and concepts are still valuable.

Notes

Design tips for WordPress
1. Create and keep lists: checklists, color lists, font lists, image treatment lists, etc.
2. Design for Firefox first, then fix for Internet Explorer.
3. Validate your HTML and CSS often.
• validate each chunk of code as you complete it
• visually check in several browsers
• use W3C validators to validate: W3C Markup Validation and W3C CSS Validation
• use Firefox’s Error Console to debug and validate JavaScript
4. Consider usability. It naturally lends itself to great design.

If necessary, assign multiple classes to a single HTML element for more flexible CSS targeting.

Use PHP include calls to modularize your theme. Put code to be reused into a new PHP file, then call it with <?php include(TEMPLATEPATH . '/page.php'); ?>

Use All in One SEO Pack plugin to generate metatags

Recommended web design websites
A List Apart
Smashing Magazine

[Claire Ragin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found the online Wordpress documentation to be overwhelming to a beginner, so I got this book as a jumpstart. It helped me get started; as I went along I found I relied on it less and less, and relied more on the online docs. It was a good intro and helped me get going more quickly than if I tried to do it all with the official documentation.

[Sean · Rating 1 out of 5]

Laughably, ridiculously useless. Way too short, way too sparse, almost no workable examples, way too many typos. This was obviously thrown together at the last minute by a desperate author/publishing team.

[Lilla · Rating 5 out of 5]

review forthcoming!

[Jay Cruz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Finally done with this one. I'm sure this is one I'll be coming back to again. It's good, but it's a little above my level of knowledge of web design.

[Ricardo Robles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Up until now, and even if I'm just fast reading it, seems very good and promising.