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How to Create a WordPress Theme in 5 Minutes Flat - Not!
By johne | November 26, 2008
Update - sorry folks this site has disappeared without trace - I’ll be posting a review of Artisteer soon - I know it’s not free but it is excellent….
Make a WordPress theme? To my own design? In 5 minutes. It might just sound too good to be true, but I assure you it’s for real… I know, I’ve done it, and if I can do it anybody can do it! Admittedly the 5 minutes is only possible if you’re sticking to a fairly basic design and using their images, or you have your own graphics ready to go, but it is possible.
It’s equally possible (in fact considerably more likely) that you’ll spend ages there playing around, and end up reverting to something you knocked up in the first place (well, that’s what usually happens to me - the more I fiddle the worse it gets!)
I love WordPress, and regularly use blogs for niches that I want to explore (or exploit!). And therein lies the problem…. every time I have an idea for a niche I have to find a theme to suit, and I can easily spend half a day on that, and I still end up with something where I have to hunt around to find a new header and background image, and then I have to mod them to fit. Not to mention the trauma of changing margins or padding just because my headings are shorter or longer than the originals, or the text overlaps my new image badly, and maybe the original font doesn’t work so well, and the links are the wrong colour now - and then hoping that I’ve done it right and that I don’t break the theme…. and that’s assuming I can find the right place in the code to do it all anyway! Aaaaagghhhh!
Well now that’s all changed with the advent of a new online tool, and it’s quite simply - brilliant. It’s like a WYSIWYG editor, and you simply build up your unique theme by picking a base template which defines the "style", e.g. two column or three column, tabbed or not, and then you add or modify the features you want one by one. Every template is hugely configurable - fonts, colours, header images etc. etc., though of course it makes sense to start with the one that’s the closest fit to your desired finished product.
The site’s in beta at present, but I’ve found it to be stable so far, and at the time of writing there are two versions available. The latest incarnation is on the home page, and has some fairly snazzy designs - almost ready to go "straight out of the box", but I marginally prefer the original version which has somewhat more basic templates available, and more of them.
Enough already! I’ve included the links to both versions, so pop over and try it out - it’s actually fun and very rewarding! The new version is on the home page at themepower.com, and the original version is at http://v1.themepower.com. Happy designing!
Topics: General |
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