A complete guide to creating professional WordPress themes

• Take control of the look and feel of your WordPress site

• Simple, clear tutorial to creating Unique and Beautiful themes

• Expert guidance with practical step-by-step instructions for theme design

• Design tips, tricks, and troubleshooting ideas

In Detail

This title will take you through the ins and outs of creating sophisticated professional themes for the WordPress personal publishing platform. It will walk you through clear, step-by-step instructions to build a custom WordPress theme. From development tools and setting up your WordPress sandbox, through design tips and suggestions, to setting up your theme's template structure, coding markup, testing and debugging, to taking it live it reviews the best practices. The last three chapters are dedicated to additional tips, tricks and various cookbook recipes for adding popular site enhancements to your WordPress theme designs using third-party plugins.

Whether you're working with a pre-existing theme or creating a new one from the ground up, WordPress Theme Design will give you the know-how to understand how themes work within the WordPress blog system, enabling you to take full control over your site's design and branding.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 32 Ratings

You're better off with free online tutorials or hiring a designer with programming skills - 2009-11-06
Reviewer Rating:
I rely on reviews when I'm looking for a beginner's reference book, and I felt misled by these reviews. I'm comfortable with HTML, CSS and I know a little bit about PHP--what I didn't understand was how WordPress works and how to make my own theme for it. This book walked me through a theme design, but it failed to explain these steps that actually teach you anything applicable.

I ended up doing what I hoped to avoid: I spent hours searching for online tutorials and pouring through the WordPress Codex. I was shocked that free resources did a better job explaining how to break up my design and make it a WordPress theme.

I'm much more dubious of Amazon reviews now and this publisher. In short: this books walks you in a circle and you gain nothing from it except frustration.

A Complete Guide? I think not - 2009-09-22
Reviewer Rating:
This is by no-means a complete guide to Theme Design for WordPress. It's a good book for beginners but most web designers have previous knowledge before they start designing themes for WordPress. What noob to web design is going to start by creating themes for WordPress? The whole "design approach" section is a complete waste of time. The book glances over a few core topics for creating themes, but doesn't go in-depth at all. I've found better tutorials on blogs or online forums. If you're looking for a more complete book for WordPress theme design I recommend "How to be a Rockstar WordPress Designer". [...] I found it to go further in depth and teach some unique functions that help create original themes.

Not what I expected - 2009-09-23
Reviewer Rating:
I find this book a bit boasting of what the author did, not really helpful in designing my own theme. I was expecting more how to and less "look at what I did". The "follow along" instructions were a tutorial on how to design a website. I already know how to do that, I wanted something on the css and php of the WordPress application, without having to read the learn to be a website designer.

this book didn't quite teach me how to construct a wordpress site - 2010-08-06
Reviewer Rating:
I was following it precisely in the beginning luckily i have some knowledge in CSS and XHTML to follow so it was OK to go through but when i got the part creating PHP templates from the HTML files and CSS file..... i was completely lost. She didn't even point out index.php file is consists of many little PHP files...I wish there was a little more details in the beginning so that people who are new to Wordpress will get more interesting... definitely needs improvement

A good introduction to Wordpress Themes - 2010-05-27
Reviewer Rating:
I found the book very helpful with regards to creating a typical Wordpress theme that has a few additional needs beyond the standard themes. I just finished doing some contract work on a website built on Wordpress, and this book addressed most of the questions that I had. This book is a great starting point for an experienced web developer interested in building websites on the WP platform.

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