Book Image

WordPress 2.8 Theme Design

Book Image

WordPress 2.8 Theme Design

Overview of this book

Themes are among the most powerful features that can be used to customize a web site, especially in WordPress. Using custom themes you can brand your site for a particular corporate image, ensure standards compliance, and create easily navigable layouts. But most WordPress users still continue to use default themes as developing and deploying themes that are flexible and easily maintainable is not always straightforward. It's easy to create powerful and professional themes for your WordPress web site when you've got this book to hand. It provides clear, step-by-step instructions to create a robust and flexible WordPress theme, along with best practices for theme development. It will take you through the ins and outs of creating sophisticated professional themes for the WordPress personal publishing platform. It reviews the best practices from development tools and setting up your WordPress sandbox, through design tips and suggestions, to setting up your theme's template structure, coding markup, testing and debugging, to taking it live. The last three chapters are dedicated to additional tips, tricks, and various cookbook recipes for adding popular site enhancements to your WordPress theme designs using third-party plugins. Whether you're working with a pre-existing theme or creating a new one from the ground up, WordPress Theme Design will give you the know-how to understand how themes work within the WordPress blog system, enabling you to take full control over your site's design and branding.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
WordPress 2.8 Theme Design
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface
Index

Adding text—typography


We're now ready to make our typography considerations. Even if you're designing far into the experience side of the scale, text is the most common element of a site, so you should be prepared to put a fair amount of thought into it.

Starting with the text

I like to add an amount of text that has a site name and description paragraph right on top in my header tags, the main body text up high in the content tags, secondary and then tertiary text below that (some of which usually ends up in a sidebar), and the navigation at the very bottom of the page in an unordered list. It's basically that "perfect page" SEO experts go on and on about—a Google bot's delight, if you will.

Minimally, I include <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, and <h4> headers along with links, strong and emphasized text, as well as a block-quote or two. If I know for sure that the site will be using the specific markup such as <code> or form elements such as <textarea> or <input...