My First WordPress Theme – Part 1

My First WordPress Theme

Here’s what I’ve done with my first WordPress theme I’m creating. Why am I creating a WordPress theme when there are a billion of them out there for free and much better than what I can create, as well as all the available premium themes that are outstanding? Well, good question. 🙂

My wife is being particular in what she wants on her new WordPress blog. Which is ok, because I want to learn what goes into creating a WordPress theme. Either the theme I create will last for a while or it will get transformed into something else, or will totally go away at some point, and that’s ok. Then we’ll opt for a freebie theme that I can adjust to our liking or a premium theme.

My wife’s an artist and she wants everything together on one site – the blog, the art gallery, about page, and any other pages she thinks of that make sense. She only wants to maintain one site. I’m all for it because I’m the one who’ll maintain it. So after scouring the web and looking at billions of themes I’ve decided to dive in and “Just Do It!!”

Which also means there’s tons of WordPress stuff out there to read about. Thanks everyone who blogs exclusively about WordPress. Thanks for all the information and all the time I have to spend reading. 🙂 It’s all good though, I’m enjoying it.

I have a technical background in a lot of different programming languages from years past so I feel comfortable digging in and doing this.

My guide for this endeavor is Small Potato’s tutorial series over at WPDesigner. This is a great tutorial series on creating a WordPress theme. I figured it’s a good basis for establishing some standards for creating my first WordPress theme.

As I work through the tutorial I’ll change things the way I want for my situation as well as later on maybe tweaking some of the code based on other WordPress theme creation advice and articles I read and discover.

After working through lesson 5 of 16 lessons, here’s what I’ve got so far:

Theme Title: Scofield

Files created and populated:

• index.php
• style.css

If you don’t understand any of the files I’m talking about and you wish to learn more about creating WordPress themes, and what goes into them, head on over to Small Potato’s blog WPDesigner. You certainly don’t have to do the tutorial but you can skim through it to get a feel for what’s involved.

The output so far is the image at the top of this article. WOW!! Now that’s a minimalist theme. 🙂