Wordpress Themes Tutorial for Beginners

Develop your first WordPress theme: Tag 1 of 3

Topics are a big part of what makes WordPress as much of a favorite as it is, and in this three-part set we take you through a step-by-step procedure that leads to a complete, working WordPress topic. This is the ideal starting point if you are new to WordPress!

Are you looking for a free WordPress topic to get up and running quickly? Wellcome to the first issue of this three-part tutorial on how to get into creating themes for WordPress. Topics are one of the best things about WordPress and the easiness of locating, deploying and customizing it is one of the things that have made WordPress the huge it is today - over 20 million blog posts are Hosted on WordPress.com alone.

Out of the million who use WordPress, it is likely that a large percentage of these customers do not know how to build a website submission, let alone a WordPress design. It is also very likely that many WordPress user are not comfortable with words like "FTP" or "upload".

The integrated themes browser and themes plumber means you don't need to know the tech specs or how themes work, or even how to add them to your host accounts. It is this user-friendly touch to the topics that makes WordPress the rugged blogging plattform that supports not only face-to-face blog and journals, but also some of the biggest tech and newsglogs on the web today.

In fact, there are even whole market places based on WordPress themes, such as ThemeForest, whose writers earn billions of US dollar every year. That' s why we have found that issues are important, but you probably already know all about it. When you read, it's clear that you want to hop aboard and begin to create your own themes for your own use, sharing them with others or selling them on a market place or the like.

For your topic to have an effect or become widespread, it is important to know the composition of a good topic. Why a good topic? WordPress is easily assembled, but a good design requires careful design, preparedness and work. Lots of folks deserve a good life with the sale of WordPress themes because they know what makes a good subject, and they know how to put that know-how into action - a gift you will hopefully have.

Focus this session on taking an already encoded HTML/CSS file layout and convert it into a lively, vibrant WordPress themed. As you will be creating your designs without our help, let us look at some of the things that differentiate the best-selling designs from the off-the-shelf free themes that don't have much airtime.

It' s a bit hard to describe this point, but a topic must look well done according to contemporary styling norms. It is always a good suggestion to get fellowship feedbacks from sites like dribble or forestst as they are home to many renowned topic designer and developer. One thing that all the most fashionable themes have in common now is their endorsement of the widget.

To those who have lived under a cliff all these years; Widgets are small, adjustable add-ons that are often shown in the side bar or bottom bar of a topic. Widget's are another great extension to WordPress that help make it so popular. That' s why they're so useful. Many themes come with user-defined Widgets that have been developed specifically for this topic, WordPress also comes with a number of built-in default Widget like calendars, searching fields or archive.

Using the Dispatch Board, you can set the order in which you want to display your Widgets, and even the area (sidebar, bottom, or wherever) in which they appear. They are great because they give the user a great way to add a topic feature without having to tap a line of coding. Broadcasts use (mostly) standard class definitions, which means you don't have to get ready for every individual made widget, just make some basic rule available for them all.

Some of the most frequent bugs I see are many new WordPress topic creators who forgot to track back and don't really add proper commentsupport. Though not every Blog uses trackingbacks, it is important to recognize that it could be a dealer for many Web sites to show their tracking.

To find out what he is looking for, a reader who reads the commentary on a posting must be scrolling through a mixture of pegs, tracks and commentaries if it is simple to avoid this type of behaviour. WordPress since 2. Interleaved annotations allow you to respond not only to the posting or page, but also to a annotation, similar to the Tuts+ pages (as shown above).

Interleaved commenting is a little trickier to deploy than most other things, but it's a great thing when done properly, and it can significantly enhance the value of a topic, as interleaved commenting encourages commenting activities - something that blogs appreciate. Internationally acclaimed Avatars are a great thing that you can append to any topic, I'm sure you're probably all acquainted with them, but for those who aren't acquainted with the concept; a gravity bar is an Avatar associated with your e-mail - so every post in a Blog shows an avatar you've made.

Servatars are very simple to deploy as long as they are correctly placed in your designs (not as a thought). Though some themes work better without it, gravity feeds usually give the user a stronger link to a blogs because they give the commentary a little personal touch. When you go to a favorite market place like ThemeForest and go through the most favorite topics of the weeks, you will find that almost all of them have a kind of Postavatar.

Let's take a look at one of the most favourite themes on ThemeForest - Striking: Every contribution has an icon with a fixed width and a fixed altitude that serves as an Avatar. Through the integration of a postal avant-garde, the pictures help to open the text and give the page a good stream.

Obviously there is no need for an avatar to be like this, here is another way of presenting post-avatars used on our affiliate site Nettuts+: In general, these are more commonly used in magazinestyle themes (we won't use one in our own topic ), but give the topic a lot of extra sophistication.

Here is an example from a pop topic: You can see that at the top of the topic we have a large picture, superimposed by a heading and an extract or short text of the item/page it is leading to. Features can be the most favorite entries of the monthly or just the newest ones.

They are often a little overwhelming for face-to-face blogging, so it's great to have them as an optional rather than a compulsory part of the overall look. And the more customisable a piece of furniture is, the more likely it is to become successful. Naturally, not everything that is published in a weblog is just a weblog entry.

An awesome example of this kind of inclusion is a recent topic named Gridlocked: The gridlocked uses a user-defined mail style (in this case, the mail style is a video post) that nicely integrates a video into the topic. Several of the other choices that the topic has to offer are YouTube video, an audioplayer, and post-avatars.

Each of them (with their own user-defined mail type) looks great at full width with no borders or cushioning at the top of the outline. User-defined mail items are both efficient and simple to deploy, the blogscripter just defines a bit of meta-information, the topic picks that information and determines which content to use.

Themes, as you probably know, consist of many different types of file, each of which plays its own role in the presentation or function of a topic. Let's take a look at some of the most popular WordPress standard recognition documents we will be looking at. The majority of data is self explaining, just by its name:

Normally this filename contains our design up to , it also contains the wp_head() feature, which is one of the most important hook in WordPress. This is an optionally available filename that can be accessed by using get_sidebar(). You can use this filename for a side bar, navigator or similar. Here you will also normally insert the widget source to run the widget if your design allows it.

A part that is easily guessed, here ends the topic and you can also sign up a second section where you can view Widget's. Naturally, you can show the widget wherever you want, but sidebars and footers are the most used. Is used to view a page - not to be mistaken for a posting.

This is the mail that is used to view a unique blogs posting, but very similar to the page. pdf in cipher. The index, as you can probably guess-by guessing, does the part of the work for a blogs; it displays postings, results, error reports, and so on. This function may be new to you.

Here, topic-specific features are saved - usually the features for registering widget-enabled areas. Here also tracksbacks, interleaved annotations and other related features are used. One topic can use as many or as few topic file types as you want, but these are the ones that occur most often in almost every topic.

Basically, the design of the themes is the designer's choice - for example, there could be vimeo.php, youtube.php, and audio.php, which show their particular mail type instead of having all the source stuff on one page. either singlepoint. One of the ways that a topic can be easily customized is through a options page for dashboards.

An overwhelming part of the common topics have a kind of option panels that facilitates any need for the blogs to ever change codes or graphic data. It' a great sales argument, because not every weblogger who uses your new design will know that #0000000000 means dark.

Option pages can be a basic one-page lay-out with a few check boxes, text areas and slider controls, or they can be an entirely multi-page administration pane within the multi-page Dashboard to manage many different items of a topic. Usually, option pages allow you to customize items such as: It' not possible to include all available choices, because each topic is different from the last and needs different extra features.

Whilst a small private topic may not need a full option page, it is important to keep in mind that the vast majority have no technical knowledge. We' re going to get directly into our WordPress coders next weekend and begin working on a fundamental, individual WordPress topic. Feel free - emboldened - to use your own layouts that you would like to change into a WordPress topic, but don't be afraid if you don't have one, as a plain layouts is provided.

They don't need to know anything about WordPress topics because we will start from zero!