How to make a wordpress theme?

Apr 25th, 2009

Well I find that WordPress is quite a easy system to understand as long as you know how to code. If you do not know at least HTML, CSS, and PHP then you probably should not read anymore and learn these languages before thinking of trying to create a WordPress theme. Most WordPress themes are made up with certain pages these are 404, archive, comments, footer, functions, header, index, page, search, searchform, sidebar, single, and style. All of these pages are PHP pages except the style sheet which is a CSS page.

Pages List

The 404 page is your error page which I will talk about a little later.
The archive page is for when you search.
The comment page is for your comments.
The footer page is for your footer.
The functions page is for any functions your would like to create.
The header page is your header for every page.
The index is your home page so that it can have a different layout than all the other pages.
The page page is the layout page for all the pages you create in the admin.
The search is the layout for the page when you search for something.
The searchform is just what you have the search form doing.
The sidebar is creating the sidebar so when you add it to pages it will go through the functions.
The single page is for when you click on a post it will take you to the single post.

To Have Successful Theme

All of these pages are a must for you to have a successfully working WordPress theme. There are quite a few thing that you can do with these pages and other pages that I will talk about some other time. With everything that you can do with these page it will take much more than one blog post to explain so I am going to leave the first one short and sweet. I am going to go into a somewhat step by step walk through on how to make each page. One of the first thing that I would do as a new theme developer is find a free theme somewhere on the web preferably wordpress.org/extend/themes and if you would like to make this easy search for wooden default and this is my theme that is really simply and easy to understand. Now that you have your theme take a look at the pages in your theme folder you should either have all of these pages or more. If you don’t have these pages I will eventually teach you how to create them. Well I am going to leave everyone with this task and post the next part in a couple days. If you do not download my theme please leave me a comment on what one’s you do download. Or if you are a designer and would not like to take the time to develop a theme please feel free to send your mockups/psds over to me and I will develop the theme. Of course I will host it on my site and expect a link to my site in the footer. But that is standard for all themes.

Website Design , Development, and SEO Marketing

If you need assistance with web design, web development, search engine optimization, or marketing done to one of your sites please feel free to contact me or Chosen. Chosen is a small, but growing Lansing-based firm offering Web Development, Web Design, Web Hosting, and Web Marketing skills. We have done work for clients and companies, by preference, but we also take contract work. We have worked with most of the biggest web companies in the Lansing Area and all the way out to California. We would love to hear from you.