Experience of creating WordPress theme

Creating a new WordPress theme for my own site is one of my target this year. If you been this website before maybe you know that previously I’m using free WordPress theme especially the beautiful Illacrimo theme. I like this free theme a lot and been using for quite a long time. However, I decided to take a step further to design a new theme for my own blog.

Develop a WordPress theme is not hard, but it’s not easy job too. Luckily there is a lot of resources out there especially the WordPress Documentation and Noupe’s Powerful Guide to master your WordPress that provide useful guidance to help developing a theme. But before comes to the coding, I sketched my idea on paper and design the layout with Photoshop.

Conceptualize and Design

I decided to use jeans texture as part of design when writing the post Jeans Texture Free Download. Then for the color bar and blog color scheme, I got my inspiration from traditional Japanese color. I want to achieve clean and uncluttered design so I decided to go for 2 column layout with big white space. Then also design the style for list bullets, blockquote, code and custom 404 design.

• This is list #1
• This is list #2
• This is list #3

This is an example of a blockquote design.
Quoted text will be here.

This is an example of code style.
I might use this in future blog post
that require to show codes.

Creating template and testing

After finalizing the design, I slice out the graphics and start to code a static html before jumping into WordPress templates. For coding, I use Dayvan theme as a guidance to my design because we shares similar layout structure. I also use Illacrimo and Glossy Blue theme as part of the guidance too. Then I started to put all my codes into the templates files.

I created a sub domain to test the template whether it works fine or the other way round. With the guidance and readings previously, I spent two nights to turn the design into working template. I had some frustration moment when things gone wrong but I was able to solve it. Finally it is all done and the theme was activated on this Monday. Finally I have my blog with my own design on it! I am very excited and can’t sleep that night.

End note

Well, basically this is the process of creating my custom WordPress theme for my blog. This giving me confidence to work with WordPress and designing more themes in future. Indeed WordPress is a superb engine and it is easy to working with it.

But things just don’t stop here. I will continue tweaking my theme to make it better. If you have any comments and suggestion kindly please leave a comment below. Your comment is much appreciated.