These days, WordPress is the venue of choice for the majority of new blogs, and quite a few non-blog sites as well. And why not? It’s extremely flexible, easy to use, and free!

I recently finished reading the book Build Your Own Wicked WordPress Themes, which was written by a group of people who do exactly that for a living: write and sell WordPress Themes. So what does it take to be a WordPress theme designer?

Well, as it turns out…not that much! A WordPress theme is just a collection of PHP and CSS files, most of which have already been created for you; while you can start from scratch, it’s much easier to use premade components and save yourself a lot of work. Such components, called theme frameworks, provide all of the basic functionality your site needs, which leaves you free to concentrate on the site’s look and feel. Accordingly, you can create an entire custom look just by writing one CSS file.

But what if you don’t know CSS? Fortunately, it’s not hard to learn; in fact, I got a crash course in it myself just by looking at the existing CSS files for the theme framework I was using and modifying them to get the look that I (or, more accurately, my wife) wanted; I also read three chapters in a CSS book to learn the basics. In less than a week, I had a new theme put together that looks better than 99% of the available free themes and fits our website’s content much better as well. Win! Don’t settle for the same look at thousands of other people – built your own custom WordPress themes!

I’ve written in more detail about the experience on my book review website, where I’m also in the process of posting reviews on numerous other technical books, mostly by O’Reilly.

What next?

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