This is my 4th post on Designing WordPress Blogs From Scratch.

In the last post, we covered everything surrounding our content (header, footer, sidebar) and got an intro to using WordPress functions in PHP.

Index.php

Now, technically, the only other file you need is index.php. This is where you define how each blog entry is displayed. Again, using the index.php in WordPress’s default theme to guide us, this file contains:

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This is the 3rd post in my series on Designing WordPress Blogs From Scratch.

Okay, so you’ve got your snazzy new blog designed in a webpage. You’re happy with how it looks in all the browsers. You’ve got your styles in their own CSS file and your HTML is laid out with the default WordPress DIVs like in the pretty picture below:

Great!

Now you’re ready to WordPress-o-tize it.

The first thing you want to do is grab the files from the WordPress default theme because, as they say, good artists borrow, great ones steal.

Create a working directory named however you want to name your theme (e.g., "BobsBlogOPassion") and copy all the files from WordPress’s \wp-content\themes\default directory into it*.  We’ll use these files to guide us.

* If you haven’t got a WordPress install yet, you can install it on your server (I use a web hoster, Applied Innovations, who provides a nice 1-click install for it) or even on your local computer if you want a version to play/test with (Windows, Unix). Note that the free WordPress.com does not allow installing custom themes, so you’ll need your own server/hoster for this.

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This is the 2nd post in my series on Designing WordPress Blogs From Scratch.

Design Fundamentals

Ok, so you’ve got an idea. You think you might want to design your own custom blog around it because, as Alec Rios says,

"What a boring world it would be if every blogger simply kept the default WordPress theme.There is absolutely no excuse for this. There are too many free and unique themes available. But these days, you need to do even more than that to stand out. You have to go the extra mile, tapping into your hidden well of creativity, to set yourself apart from the other 100 million blogs out there."

Excellent!  You want to be sure to start things off with a good understanding of design fundamentals. I’m still learning here, but a couple of resources that I found totally invaluable for grokking good design are:

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It turns out that if you can do HTML, CSS, and a bit of scripting then you can totally design your own WordPress blog from scratch. Forget browsing the 1,193 free WordPress themes and trying to pick the one that best fits your style. I mean, seriously, wow! in the time it takes to browse them and figure out how to customize them, I’d rather just learn to create one myself.

Okay, I know, you’re not all code-crazed hacker chicks. But, I found it amazingly powerful to have complete control over the look & feel of my blog while taking advantage of WordPress’s built-in capabilities so that all the standard blog functions are automatically handled for me. So, I thought I’d share a bit of what it looks like to build your own WordPress design from scratch and how I did this for The Hacker Chick Blog.

The first and most important thing to know is that WordPress files are just regular ol’ HTML and CSS with PHP script embedded in them. So, if you’re comfortable building web pages, then you’re going to be comfortable working with WordPress.

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