Wordpress is a very useful tool as I found out when started writing this blog. When it’s installed, the default theme is used, which is fine but not what a blogger usually wants. A blogger in my view would like to have his or her own theme, which illustrates the point of the blog, the blog’s direction and shows the author’s taste.
There are two alternatives here. The first is to download and install a theme that has already been created by someone else and then customize it. There are so many themes available and so many designs that when I looked at them, I was amazed. But I couldn’t find exactly what I wanted, so I have had to download one, install it, customize it and even went to Styles.css file in order to tweak it to use the fonts that I wanted, the colours that I wanted and so on. That was hard ’cause I personally didn’t create the CSS style and finding what corresponded to what was - correctly saying - “difficult”. I tried the second theme, the third theme but it appeared that it wasn’t what I wanted at the end of the day - the design just didn’t click if you know what I mean.
What I wanted was a completely custom design. At the moment (December 2008) there are two ways to create your own Wordpress design from scratch:
The first is to go to Wordpress Theme Generator www.yvoschaap.com/wpthemegen/. Everything is done online here: a user chooses colours, fonts, panel positions and so on and after the design is complete, he or she gets the files that represent the new theme - to be added to the Wordpress installation - plus the permanent link to the new theme online - for possible future amendments. Excellent!
The second way is to use a program, which can be downloaded here: http://www.wordpressthemegen.com/. It works in the same way as above but offers much less options than the online editor. I have installed it but then removed it ’cause I didn’t really need. One can always try it anyway because all people have different tastes and what someone likes the others dislike and the other way round.
After the initial design, it is possible to add pictures, customize backgrounds, tweak the widget positions and do the other things a designer with CSS and PHP knowledge would do. If you don’t know all this stuff or don’t want to be bothered - I’m sure the new design would look nice without them if colours are matched and the fonts are readable and not intrusive.
Happy blogging!
