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Site Redesign with WordPress – Themes and Inspiration

Published on February 16, 2007 in General, WordPress

Fundamentally 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

Cutline Theme Screenshot

Glossy Blue

Glossy Blue Theme Screenshot

Press Row

Press Row Theme Screenshot

Redoable

Redoable Theme Screenshot

October Special

October Special Theme Screenshot

Subtle

Subtle Theme Screenshot

Unsleepable

Unsleepable Theme Screenshot

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,

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3 Comments

  1. Tari Akpodiete, February 18, 2007:

    love the new look!

  2. Clive, July 23, 2007:

    I like that static rss/mail/home/sitemap link on the left – is that a widget?

  3. lesliefranke, August 6, 2007:

    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.

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Leslie Franke:[les-lee fran-key]; 1. Husband and proud dogowner; 2. Seventh-day Adventist; 3. Web Designer; 4. Atlanta Braves Fan; 5. Northeast Ohio Native; 6. Bottle Caps Lover; 7. Certified 'Freakonomic';