Congratulations!
- Filed under: Wpdesigner.com
If you’ve been following the WordPress Theme Tutorial Series, then congratulations! You’ve done it! Not only did you learned how to put a WordPress theme together, you also endured mind-numbing, half-hearted instructions for the last twenty-five days.
I admire your patience and perseverance because I would’ve smacked myself silly if I had to follow my own instructions.
Review
Each day, I’d put in about two hours in the morning to create the daily lesson; some lessons did take much longer than two hours. It was harder than I thought it’d be because I didn’t plan it. I should’ve written the instructions, reviewed the steps, and followed the steps to spot where I could’ve improved to help you better understand. But to avoid smacking myself, I didn’t.
The Future
Now that I’ve given you 32 days of WordPress themes and the recent tutorial series to munch on, what’s next for Wpdesigner.com? I really don’t know.
Prior to finishing the tutorial series, I had plans for content exspansion, but realized my plans were only to cover the fact that I haven’t created new WordPress themes for a while. Ultimately, Wpdesigner.com is about creating WordPress themes and giving WordPress users more design options, not about tutorials and challenges. (Although, I enjoy taking on challenges because they keep me motivated.)
Fellow Potatoes
I need your help to keep Wpdesigner growing. Throw me some ideas…
Make a tutorial on how to make a 3 columns theme!!
Tutorial for creating a stae-of-the-art lookig theme!
C’mon!!!!
Wo yao! Wo yao!
Beh, I can’t spell state and looking.
Hey – looking at these photos, I’d like a tutorial on how to keep my workspace tidy!
A question, that’s not really on topic, but … I’ve seen conflicting advice on the etiquette of editing templates that we download. You’re a designer, offering free templates – how do you feel about this?
Is it OK, if we include a credit (eg “Based on design by X” with a clickable link)? Or shouldn’t we be editing them at all – after all, as you’re an expert, we can only make them worse.
Just remembered – I’d like to know more about widgetising my theme. I know we added code for this, but although I’ve read the Automattic info, I’m still not sure what to do next.
You should see my desk, before I cleaned it up hahaha.
Not every blog has the same identity or wants to give off the same feeling. Therefore, I believe free themes are meant to be edited.
For every theme designer, allowing the blogger to easily customize the theme should be one of the main concerns. I need to improve on that for future themes.
@cj – I’ll touch on 3 column themes in future lessons.
loved your tutorial. Very informative and very helpful for both wordpress development and understanding as well as for a basic grasp of php, css and xhtml
As far as ideas for future projects…how about converting a photoshop image into a wordpress site–or better yet–making a wordpress site a cms site –less bloggish and more website …
again–thanks for your great work!!! outstanding!!
I can’t wait for the 3 column theme lesson!!
I’d like to see more of how your creative thought process works. if possible.
Although I’m (reasonably) OK with (most of) the technical aspects of coding, etc., I freeze up whenever I try and think of something new.
I usually end up using one of your themes as a template, even if I code it from scratch myself. There’s nothing wrong with this, as your themes are great, but an insight into how you go about creating a theme – from the very beginning to Photoshop to web – would be invaluable to me, and I’m sure many others.
Whatever you do, please keep on doing something, as your stuff is great. Cheers.
Congrats, Smalls, on finishing your tutorial!
I was gonna give you some ideas, but I can’t think of any. D’oh!
Like so many others on here, I’ve been chuffed to bits with all the help that Small Potato has given us. I’ve said it before – you’re a true inspiration.
Following the excellent tutorial, I want two more things:
1. I want to develop a really simple – but eye-catching – one-column WordPress template. I don’t care for the bells and whistles – I’d hope the header image would contain a few tabs, but other than that, I want a nice clean look.
2. I want to learn how to customise the header area so I can change its look, add tabs, just generally make it as effective as it can be.
Thanks again!
hey, guess what. I made a Theme for myself! LOL! It wasn’t easy but I cracked my head a lot to create one with the help of your tutorial! THANKS!
Winston, good stuff. Very nice for your first theme.
Based on the comments so far, I’ll do case studies to cover creative process and how to convert a design into a web page layout, along with lessons on advance techniques for th header.
Hi,
Thank you for the tutorials and the introduction to wordpress. I am a novice coder and found your-just-do-it approach very helpful and inspiring. I would be happy to offer detailed feedback if that would be useful to you. My big questions at this point are:
-early on you talked about installing the wp themes plugin and the widget plugin-did I miss that?
-can I upload and install the wp setup that I develop with your tutorial on my desktop to my hosting account ?
-how can I put a graphic in the header?
-how can I add an additional side bar?
-how can I add adsense blocks to sidebars and body?
Sorry to save them all up for one hit. I was about to give up on wp till I found your tutorials. The official explanations are well intended but still gobledegook for most of us.
Thanks again
ernie
Fantastic Job! I just caught this tutorial, apparently at the end. I printed every page of it!
I would like to see more in-depth css coverage in the future, for what it’s worth.
Great tutorials! This has helped me so much. I developed a theme this morning and I’m running into one problem. I added a header. Changed the background color. I want the container to have a background color of white. If I do that, the container doesn’t stretch 100%. Could you help me with that? Thanks so much.
Lea, is your theme exactly how I showed you or did you take some parts of the tutorials to use for your theme?
This is something I’m going to read. It fits in with what I’m doing this month. Thanks for taking the time out of your day to do this.
Some ideas for future items:
1. A tutorial on creating a static front/home page
2. A tutorial on creating a front page that has static text at the top (below the header) and loop info. after the static copy.
3. A tutorial on creating SEO themes, including using CSS to position div blocks in an optimized way (e.g. header div is at the bottom of the view source code, but shows up on top in the browser.) The rest of the tutorial could talk about all the best way to SEO a theme.
4. Create a downloadable theme as described in #3 above.
One more idea…
How about creating a secure comment form (with a captcha field) to prevent comment form spam?
Here’s to you SP.
(x)HTML, CSS and PHP all in one package, understandable to everybody? Wow.
I’m astonished with your approach to this, so far it is THE tutorial to look at for WP novices.
I looked at it to get your take on the WP-inherent PHP-functions, simply cause I’m great at frontend, suck at backend.
Your way of explaining PHP is just excellent, and really got me going with the further customization of my theme & templates.
Thx a million.
Thanks Casper
Hi Small Potato,
Worked my way through your lessons again (I think the 3rd time) and wanted to thank you again for your hard work. It’s really helped me understand the template tags and functions better.
Just started using Komodo IDE and put the entire WordPress installation into a project, so Komodo autofills function ids that are specific to WP, which helped a lot.
I was able to create a basic framework from which to build future sites and my code has never been cleaner.
You’ve got a dedicated reader.
Thanks Eric
Hey SP, thanks for the tutorial.. great work.. i’m so inspired for making my own themes..
Hi Christo – You can find me at the Wpdesigner forums if you run into any problem with the horizontal menu you have there on your blog. Congrats on finishing the tutorial series.
Hi SP
Just wanted to say thank you for the great tutorial, as well as answering my questions. It really helped me to wrap my head around everything.
I have just about finished my first template for my website. I’ll do another one though to post here.
Thanks again
Ben
thanks SP, this was awesome! Now I won’t have to pay someone to create my designs for me.
Thanks for this guide!
It made me understand the how wordpress is built up (at least the simple parts)
just finished all the tuts, and i feel much more capable, i want to know exactly where these case studies are that you speak about above, because like other users, i wan’t to take the next step of converting my already designed websites (mainly illustrator and photoshop) and using wordpress to make them proper blogs. here is an example:
http://www.terencenance.com/paris.html
a link to the case studies would be great, i searched the site and it didn’t come up with anything
terence
God bless you SP. You are helping lot of people like me with your tutorials. May you try posting a step by step tutorial on SEO?
good blog