To kick off my blog for 2007, I am going to write a series of posts for people wanting to know how to create a WordPress theme. Here’s some resources I’ve found useful for putting one together:
- Graphic design:
- Useful to have: Photoshop/Fireworks or the like to create your graphics
- For inspiration: sites like Netdiver, Design Melt Down, CSS Beauty, Unmatched Style etc can help sometimes.
- Color scheme ideas: Colorschemer, Daily Color Scheme and Flickr (photos are a brilliant source for color combinations). Flip through your favourite magazines (I love looking through my How Magazines and books for ideas. Look at how you’ve designed your house/bedroom/office – what color combinations do you like?
- Fonts: DaFont for free fonts and Linotype for purchasing professional fonts.
- Images: SXC for free photos and iStockPhoto for inexpensive illustrations and photos.
- XHTML/CSS templating:
- W3Schools for learning or for quick reference.
- Firefox web developer toolbar – essential for checking and testing your code. Great for live changing of your CSS.
- A text editor like Notepad++ to write your code.
- Browser Shots – for testing your design in different browsers
- For reference: Listamatic, Layoutomatic, Practical CSS and A List Apart in general, CSS Zen Garden for insight into how to achieve different layouts and effects using CSS and Layout Gala
- Understanding how WordPress themes are put together. I can’t emphasise enough how important the WordPress manual is. Don’t miss the Stepping into templates information.
- Understanding “the loop” and various WordPress tags.
- Knowing when and how to install plugins. WP-Plugins.net has many plugins, but doing a Google or delicious search for “WordPress plugin” and then the type of plugin you’re wanting will help you find many others.
- Knowing at least a little bit of PHP if you don’t want to feel so scared by WordPress tags, the loop, plugins and your templates. There’s some tutorials on W3Schools which can help.
Have you found any others which you find essential?

your thoughts
Sarit
Thanks! They really are useful!
Matthew Pennell
Adobe’s new Kuler tool is another great colour schemer resource.
Tim Bednar
The new FireBug is the most awesome tool for coding CSS for templated systems like WordPress,
http://www.getfirebug.com/
It is an essential tool for tweaking CSS and debugging JavaScript.
engtech
I’ve been doing a series of theme reviews looking for bugs in the wordpress.com installed themes.
My help page is a pretty good resource for some very common bugs people have in a lot of their themes.
http://engtech.wordpress.com/tools/wordpress/wordpress-theme-reviews/help
Garry Conn
Hey there,
I found your article from the reference in Darren Rowse article and wanted to tell you that this information will definately be very useful for me in the future. I want to learn how to create custom wordpress themes. I have wanted to do this for some time now, and some how it always gets put to the side. I will be saving this article and reading it again when I have some time set aside to work on this. Thanks for the great info.
- Garry
jhay
Another great resource. I’ll definitely create my first custom theme this year. Thanks!
Alpesh Nakar
This is an awesome!
Thanks for summing it all up
Cheers!
Alpesh
rachelcunliffe
You’re welcome
Weblog Tools Collection » Blog Archive » Useful resources for creating a Wordpress theme
[...] Useful resources for creating a WordPress theme Rachel has put together a list of resources for WordPress theme development. It won’t teach you the basics of design, but it does point you to some good places to readup. Useful, when you are just starting out and don’t know where to take that first step. (No Ratings Yet) Loading … [...]
rachelcunliffe
Thanks Matthew for the Kuler tool — hadn’t seen that before.
Tim, I’ve tried using Firebug but I guess I’m so used to using the CSS editor part of the Web Developer Toolbar that I didn’t find it so essential. But, others swear by it.
engtech, your theme review looks so thorough and should be a useful guide to people looking at default themes.
24th Floor - Technology, Web, Tips, Tutorials, Jokes and my life. » Useful resources for creating a Wordpress theme
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Sterne
Open Design templates are also extremely useful. Sites like http://opendesigns.org/ http://openwebdesign.org/ http://andreasviklund.com/templates/ and http://www.freetemplatesproviders.com/ should definitely be on the list for both inspiration and standards-compliancy educational purposes…..
sandeep
Very Resourceful post. Great!
saif
what a reference
Tassoman
You could also work with open formats (png and svg) using free software as The Gimp and Inkscape. Instead of Adobe’s.
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kevh
thank you, appreciate the work you put into providing this information to the community. also, another handy graphic editor for windows users is paint.net, especially handy for creating simple lineart
Ingo
Hi, thanks for the links! A great tool for extracting color schemes from pictures can be found here:
http://www.degraeve.com/color-palette/
Greetings,
Ingo
serialdeviant.org(y) » Theming and design
[...] Some great tips for designing your on WordPress theme. I’d like to add that The GIMP is a great image manipulator, and the price is right. [...]
links for 2007-01-03 - Squitix.de
[...] Useful resources for creating a WordPress theme | cre8d design: blog design, WordPress themes, Drupal, Web 2.0 (tags: wordpress webdesign Design theme tips reference CSS) [...]
vestel
I really liked the Dreamweaver Plugin for creating wordpress templates. A lot of plugin buttons and standart function calls selected as buttons for easy navigation.
Usefull thing for creating WordPress Theme on existing design layout, which is already converted to html/css and images.
links for 2007-01-03 at Webmercial.dk
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jack
Good post!
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[...] A quick morning post and then off the web for most of the day: Useful resources for creating a WordPress theme | cre8d design: blog design, WordPress themes, Drupal, Web 2.0. This site and my other blog are both WordPress-based. It’s a great system. I changed the theme on my other site a few weeks ago, and I might re-do this one before its 6th anniversary in a few weeks. It would be nice, but it’s not a priority. [...]
links for 2007-01-03 » Bloganbieter.de
[...] Useful resources for creating a WordPress theme | cre8d design: blog design, WordPress themes, Drupal, Web 2.0 Graphic design – XHTML/CSS templating – Understanding how WordPress themes are put together – Knowing when and how to install plugins – Knowing at least a little bit of PHP … (tags: WordPress webdesign theme reference design tips blog) [...]
Tim Bednar
The new beta FireBug is completely different from the older versions. One of the best things is that you can detach the inspector panel to a separate window; if you have 2 monitors move it to your second monitor and edit HTML/CSS on the fly.
Plus, if you open a new FireFox tab you don’t lose your changes (like WebDeveloper).
The other amazing feature is the layout box which shows you offsets, margin, padding measurements with a ruler. This is killer.
FireBug is absolutely essential for debugging JavaScript no more need for the alert(‘foo’); debugging.
Now if only something like this worked on IE….?
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Stahn
Opera Developer Tools: http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/opera-developer-tools/
Includes Live CSS Editor and DOM console.
Bárbara
Great article!
wayne
thanks for the list
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Sumesh
hai, i am new to this blog. i have a Blogspot blog, http://digitol.blogspot.com. I would like to make a new, more graphical design, of my own. You said that Photoshop is useful. Where can I find some articles and tutorials on webdesign using Photoshop?
Sumesh
sorry, i messed up with the link-
its http://digitol.blogspot.com
Thanks,
Sumesh
Rachel C
Sumesh, I would get a few photoshop books, there are some good tutorials online – you might find Computer Arts helpful, or Photoshop TV.
links for 2007-01-04 at Amy Stephen
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mhinze.com » Blog Archive » links for 2007-01-03
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Web-Sites of the Month: December 2006 | Smashing Magazine
[...] Useful Resources for Creating a WordPress Theme Lists dozens of references, which might be useful if you are going to design a new WordPress theme. [...]
craig kerwien
Great list. Also worthy of mention: I’m using aggrss, a plug-in to display RSS feed in a column. Available at http://www.soderlind.no/
It’s a great resource to supplement news content to a site.
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Tina Stephen
I just wanted to thank you for what you’ve provided here. It will be invaluable when I make the plunge to make my own themes and help to teach others to do the same.
I would also like to extend a HUGE thank you to Tim Bednar (in an above comment) for mentioning Firebug! This is the ultimate tool that EVERY web designer should be using. It’s also pretty handy for those people that are wanting to learn HTML and CSS. I don’t know how I lived without this extension!
Wordpress theme: Creating a theme (Step 2) | cre8d design: blog design, Wordpress themes, Drupal, Web 2.0
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Educated
Useful Tips for WordPress Theme Design…
cre8d design has written a pretty good list of resources for WordPress theme developement. They include one of my personal favorites, W3Schools.com, which has a lot of useful Web tutorials.
……
Utopia Parkway · links for 2007-01-04
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Secret 2 Make Money Online » Useful resources for creating a Wordpress theme
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Natti
Thank you so much for sharing these great links. I’ve still finished some themes and must find time to step into the templates.
Antje
luv it – thanks a lot! Great links!