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...