It might be weird to think that an online marketing company that pays the bills by billing labor would give away strategies. Why would you do that? Wouldn’t you prefer to tell people this is a really complicated process, and reserved only for the best and elite programmers (like ours) and you simply cannot do this yourself.
Fact is – Template design and theme design is no child’s play. Especially when wanting a professional look and feel. BUT… For a user who has HTML and some understanding of PHP it’s not hard. We really shine for our clients when we produce sales… We feel that for the companies that have the internal resources to do the work themselves can hopefully get us closer to the MARKETING Part of the process.
We’re all about results… So with that, Lets start part one of the series on Developing Wordpress Themes.
Why Bother?
When developing a regular old fashioned website using strictly HTML + CSS with static pages, the website isn’t interactive… Web 2.0 requires that your customers and consumers are able to comment and join the conversation. Easily plugged in Facebook, Twitter and other things.
Saves you hours of coding, and your staff (marketing teams and writing teams) can get editor logins where they can update the site, add new posts to the blog without access to the admin areas. The Web editor in Wordpress is as easy as Micrsoft Word… but if that’s not enough, you can even click “paste from word” if you really would rather write the post IN WORD.
So… The process of building a Theme…
Wordpress functions great as a content management system for a number of reasons. You can turn on or off almost any feature including comments, categories etc. The other thing is, the constant security updates are not affected by a custom theme. In fact… Wordpress states in their code repository, that this is one area that isn’t affected by upgrades! In otherwords, you can theme to your heart’s content and still maintain a fresh version and the security and stability upgrades.
Part 1 – Using wordpress as a CMS and designing your own custom themes…
Here is the theme structure.
If you have your own web design, and you want to bring it into wordpress… The simple way of doing that (i’ll explain in more detail in a future post) is to use something like Dreamweaver… Go to where your content starts… The area where you’d normally start writing the words to your website…
Place your cursor there, where the arrow in this image above is pointing, and then go to the code view in Dreamweaver…
Now, simply highlight everything from where the cursor showed up, all the way up… That section is your Header.php. If you want the world’s simplest wordpress design ever and only want it for adding new pages to your website, simply add the latter half of your code to the footer.php and you’ve finished.
I’ll go into greater detail when I have time.
Thanks!