solnus

It took a couple of days, but I finally created my own custom WordPress theme. I’ve been postponing it for months, and when I finally had some free time, I jumpstarted my aging Dreamweaver and went to work. I wasn’t in any real hurry, after all, there are a lot of good free WordPress theme designs out there. If this is your first time on my site, I was using a theme called StudioPress Orange and it looked something like this.

Notice how the old theme is prettier than the piece of crap you’re seeing right now. You may ask, why the heck do I need to change something that’s not broken? My answer simply is because I don’t want to use a theme that maybe a hundred or even a thousand bloggers are using right now. Call it pride, call it anything you want, but since I know a little something about designing websites, why should I rely on someone else to do the work for me.

Anyways, if you’re interested in creating your own custom theme for WordPress, the way to do it is to study the theme you’re using right now. In the theme folder, you’ll see a bunch of PHP files, a stylesheet (CSS) or two, and an images folder.

The most important file is the index.php file. Here you can see where the other PHP files like header.php, sidebar.php, footer.php are being loaded on the page. Don’t mess with the PHP codes. All you need to do is to re-arrange things. For example, if you want to have a left sidebar instead of one on the right, then you will have to move the code that loads sidebar.php higher on the page.

If you know zilch about HTML and CSS, then all this is basically looking like gibberish to you. You’ll need to stop reading this and study (w3schools.org) up first. If you do know something about this stuff, all you’ll need to do it is identify the theme’s HTML tags or create new ones and start playing around with the CSS associated with each tag. You should also upload your own images to the images folder.

You can make it easier for yourself by downloading the entire theme folder and setting it up with Dreamweaver or some other HTML editor. From here you can make the changes and preview everything on your home computer. Once you’re done, just upload the revised theme folder aptly renamed to any name you want. You can even add “Version 1.0″ if you want to improve on it later on.

If you get the hang of it, you can even start creating custom WordPress themes which you can share or sell to other bloggers.