In Inspiration, Tips, Tutorials Nov 10, 200846
How I Learned To Build Wordpress Themes
Picture your finished custom wordpress theme live on your server, completely unique and fresh. By the time you have finished reading the resources in this post that scenario will be a reality. People love custom themes, they make a blog come to life with a personality of its own. It’s no secret that they’ll reward it you for it through links, subscriptions and bookmarks.
Theme Design Lessons
How To Create A Wordpress Theme From Scratch
Good walk through in detail on creation of themes.
The 5 Minute Theme
Fast way of making simple a simple wp theme.
Turn Any Web Template Into a Theme
This flash tutorial shows how to turn any web page into a wordpress theme. The flash movie is pretty distorted but gives a good idea of what can be achieved.
Mocking Up a Theme In Photoshop
A bit of self promotion! This tutorial shows how to mock up a modern theme in photoshop.
16 Lessons On Theme Creation
Covers all bases in detail, really comprehensive lessons on all aspects of Wordpress theme creation from header to footer!
4 Step Theme Design Guide
Part 1 - Pulling it apart; Part 2 - Complete design, header, and footer; Part 3 - The sidebar; Part 4 - The content.
Basic Intoduction To Themes
Good post breaking down how the themes work for those new to Wordpress.
Offical Wordpress Documentation
The Wordpress.org Codex with theme design documentation.
Wordpress Templates For Redesign
Premium Theme Design with Thesis
Want a head start in your new theme design? Thesis will cost you $87 but it been typeset extremely well and is simple to customise the design for stunning results quickly. You’ll save the purchase price in design time with Thesis. (disclosure: URL contains our affiliate tracker)
Create Flexible Themes
Free to use selection of Wordpress themes, good for customization.
100 Free Templates
Helpful Software and Cheats
Theme Editor For Dreamweaver
Now when you open a wordpress theme in Dreamweaver the whole thing is visable - legend.
Inspiration
We Love WP!
Showcase of Wordpress powered websites.
Ready Made Swatches
Great selection of swatch and color scheme ready to choose from.
CSS Galleries
Go to the bottom of this post for links to lots of CSS galleries for design inspiration.
Freebies
Free Stock Images
381k free images, an awesome free collection.
Creative Commons Images at Flickr
50 million plus creative commons images for use, make sure to check the iicences for usage permissions.
Basic Theme Creator
Basic online theme design tool, change the element color in real time then save your theme.
More Theme Resouces
40 more resource links for Wordpress theme design.
Free Social Icons
Free social icons to use on your blog.
Validation and Testing
w3c Validation Service
Well know and classic, but worth a mention.
Cross Browser Checking
View screenshots of your finished theme in all the browsers.
46 Comments
Nov 10, 2008
Some extremly useful stuff here, wonder what theme dreamer is like! , thesis is defiantly a cool theme.
Nov 10, 2008
oh, I am so glad to see this list - I wanted to do this work for myself, but You saved me time :))
bookmarked!
Nov 10, 2008
Thanks this is really a great list.
Nov 10, 2008
This is the best “how to make a wordpress theme?” list ever!
Thanks!
And we are still waiting for your “Premium Wordpress Theme Design Part 2″ post.
Nov 10, 2008
@ Celebx - don’t worry part 2 will be coming soon!
Nov 10, 2008
Nice post, you showed me definitely some useful resources I didn’t know about.
Nov 10, 2008
This is an awesome list. I’m surprised that on the “free list” that new-wordpress-themes.net isn’t listed!
Nov 10, 2008
great post
Nov 10, 2008
inspiring - i can hardly wait until I can design something unique for my blog, thank you!
Nov 10, 2008
Hi all…
i wanna recomend the screencast of css-tricks
Nov 11, 2008
Thanks for a great list of resources.
I personally learned how to build WP themes through WPDesigner (http://www.wpdesigner.com/). Some pretty decent tutorials over there for those new to WP.
Nov 11, 2008
That is simply awesome. I found your blog through Digg and I love it. Added to RSS feed and can hardly wait on part 2. When I get home this part is going to be dealt with. Thanks again!
Nov 11, 2008
I’ll bookmarked this site and learn more deeply of wordpress.good site
Nov 11, 2008
Also check table of content of wordpress tutorials
http://acomment.net/table-of-contents-of-wordpress-tutorials-helps-tips-and-tricks/4
Nov 11, 2008
WOW! This is a great list of resources! Thanks a lot as I know a lot of people will benefit from this including myself.
Nov 11, 2008
Thanks, I was just starting to take a look at creating my own WP theme so your article is very timely.
Nov 11, 2008
Thanks, Great post.
Nov 11, 2008
Thanks this is really a great list.
Nov 11, 2008
Nice list of some very good resources. I’m currently building my own wordpress theme, so it will really help me!
Nov 11, 2008
Great resource- thanks very much. I’m currently re-vamping my site (using Blogger) and am getting a bit frustrated with it! I’ll be changing to Wordpress in the furture, no dout, and this is going to make it much easier - thans!
Nov 11, 2008
my friend just now suggested me your website to learn WP customization ,Seems that i’m in the right place! you rock, congrats.
Nov 11, 2008
Incredible, who would know how many things you can show people, and encourage them to do unbelivable thing using Photoshop and Notepad
Yeah, WP is cool
Nov 11, 2008
Great tips! tks a lot!
Nov 11, 2008
Great Post, we have a Wordpress of our own, there some major things you talked about that we can use in our post. Great Jobs and Thanks!
Nov 11, 2008
Amazing list! Quite a lot of reading to get through, but thanks so much for sharing
Nov 11, 2008
Thanks a lot for this wonderful list. I was about to start building a wp theme on my own. You saved a good amount of my time in searching the resources.
Nov 12, 2008
Nice list of some very good resources. I’m currently building my own wordpress theme, so it will really help me!
Nov 12, 2008
After making the theme, countering endless bug submissions from the users is a major challenge.
Nov 12, 2008
All around awesome and very comprehensive post. I’ve been checking for some new stuff here now and then and this is the best as of late.
I also love WP and design all my sites in it; as a CMS or Blog it has such a wide scope of use.
I’m not sure if I glossed over but by far the most helpful tutorial that got my WP skills moving was by Chris Coyier at CSS-Tricks. He has a three part screencast that is fantastic - first one I actually committed and stuck with and I learned a ton.
Nov 13, 2008
Thanks for this article
Nov 13, 2008
Brilliant piece of helpful article for a good headstart to create a WordPress theme. Of course other things such as CSS tricks and AJAX can come into play when users are more familiar with coding. Great!
Nov 13, 2008
Great resources! I believe you had put a lot of effort to compile the list.
Thanks.
Nov 14, 2008
Wow, great tutorial. I will be using these methods asap. Thank you.
Nov 15, 2008
This is amazingly helpful (especially as I’m trying to do this right now, and I feel a bit over my head). But I second (third?_ the screencasts at CSS-Tricks.
And Thematic would be nice here too. ;D
Nov 16, 2008
What a great list! I’ve been creating wordpress themes for a little while now and i’m always up for learning new tricks. Cheers!
Nov 17, 2008
Cool stuff!
Amy
http://www.wan2design.co.uk
Nov 17, 2008
very useful post, great to see some nice theme editing tutorials. thanx
Nov 19, 2008
Ah an amazing list of resources. If only I had the time. Do you ever wish there were about 10 more hours in a day? I get quite obsessive when I start learning and tweaking with this stuff. Anyone else have that trouble?
“yes yes i’ll make dinner when i’ve got this sidebar code sorted darling..”
Nov 20, 2008
This is a very helpful post.
Thanks for writing it.
Nov 24, 2008
Great Post! I can just imagine all the work that was put forth to write it.
I have just a simple approach. Design in Illustrator, code HTML in Dreamweaver, and then replace HTML with Wordpress snippets using a Dreamweaver plugin.
I will definitely be bookmarking this post.
Dec 2, 2008
Wow very informative thank you very much. They look very professional.
Dec 2, 2008
Can’t wait til the 2nd part of the tutorial! Thank you for the great post!!
Dec 3, 2008
Ah, I wish I’d have seen this before embarking on designing our own WordPress based blog!
Good work
Dec 5, 2008
I actually ended up using about 50% of these tutorial links when learning Wordpress. Unfortunately as comprehensive the Wordpress codex is, it didn’t really pull things together like the blogs.
Great post!
Dec 15, 2008
I’m glad I came across this list. I am just about to start learning how to customise Wrdpress and so this is great.
Thanks
Dean Nolan
Dec 17, 2008
Great list of resources.
Thanks
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