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

Chapter 2. Theme Design and Approach

Welcome to this chapter on theme design and approach. My hope for this chapter is that even you design pros may discover interesting tidbits that will help you in your WordPress theme design creation. The purpose of this chapter is to help you create a working XHTML and CSS-based mockup, with a view to having it end up being a WordPress theme while staying compliant with W3C standards and table-less CSS layout techniques.

Theme design is essentially web design and, throughout the chapter, we'll be focusing a bit more on thinking about standards and compliance first. The first part of the approach will cover what we want to design for (keeping in mind it will end up in WordPress) and the second half will focus more on creating a design that is made with the content in mind.

This approach will give us a more flexible, yet solid XHTML and CSS structure. We'll then be able to enhance and embellish that structure with great visual design. The more "standard...