Site Redesign with Wordpress - Themes and Inspiration
Published on February 16, 2007 in General, WordPressFundamentally there are a couple of ways to go about creating a Wordpress theme. One way is to adapt another theme to meet your needs or alternatively to create a new theme from scratch. My initial thinking was that I was going to end up designing the theme from scratch but having no real previous experience with designing Wordpress themes and being far from a PHP wizard I began looking for a Wordpress theme that I could use as a basis for the site redesign. I took the approach of looking for a theme that matched the general layout I wanted for my site, colors and images were not that important as they could easily be changed later.
The first place I visited was the WordPress theme viewer. Thankfully, I could use the site’s filtering capabilities to look at only 2 column, liquid layout (most themes have a fixed width), widget-ready themes. Not finding a theme there that met all of my needs I decided to search Google using terms like “best wordpress themes” and came up with a few more potential candidates. Eventually I came up with the K2 theme (lot of code to learn from but not the type of layout I wanted) plus a list of seven other themes that could be considered potential candidates to use as a starting point. The list included:
Cutline
Glossy Blue
Press Row
Redoable
October Special
Subtle
Unsleepable
After looking through these themes my initial suspicion was correct. None of these themes perfectly met my needs but they all had good ideas from which I could borrow from to help code a new theme. With the help of these code samples and through the use of Wordpress plugins/widgets it did not appear to be too hard to cook up a nice looking Wordpress theme. The K2 theme and the Cutline/Press Row themes especially stood out as themes I could learn alot code wise from. The Subtle and Unsleepable themes were closing to the type of layout I was looking for,
love the new look!
I like that static rss/mail/home/sitemap link on the left - is that a widget?
Clive,
That is not a widget. It is just some links that have been specially coded to stay in a static location on the page.
How can I install the Plugin under Wordpress 2.5
These are great themes. I’m a big fan of Cutline. It’s very customisable and the documentation is excellent. Love the blockquote style too.
hi, nice & simple theme !
hi, very good simple theme !i will use it
The Subtle Theme Design has always been a winner for me. It has all the right stuff in all the right places.
Simple, Clean and crisp. I love it!
This theme is really good. I always like simple and effect themes and this one is an excellent example
I really like the outlay of this site. The article was great by the way. I really enjoyed it. I think it was beautifully written.
http://www.webtradez.com/HOME.html
This Theme looks and functions excellent.
Put it to use on 2 sites and it’s getting some good view and the surfers love the layout.
Thanks a lot
hi, very good simple theme !i will use it…..
It’s great to see some unique content and a good quality blog for once, actually I would be very interested in doing a link exchange with you.
How can you do this, it ist difficult to understand this. Sorry my english is bad.
R.
Mike
sorry again. Please look my theme, it looks like boring?
http://schmuckneu.de
Great design, thanks a lot
good way!
I agree with that?Great minds think alike
Interesting post. I have made a twitter post about this. Others no doubt will like it like I did.
very nice goog
Great design, thanks a lot
Fantastic information,This is the first time i heard about this. keep it up this good works.
Thanks,
Micheal