Top 10 Tutorials for Developing WordPress Themes

Being able to design custom WordPress themes is almost a must for today’s web designers. The fun thing with WordPress is that there’s always something new that you can learn to make the platform work better for you and your clients. These 10 tutorials will teach basic WordPress theming as well as some more advanced skills.

Designing for WordPress

Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks has a three-part video series for downloading and installing WordPress, all the way through everything else involved with designing a custom theme. The example theme that is built through the series is a personalized homepage theme.

Category Hacks for WordPress Theme Designers

One of the fundamental building blocks of the WordPress blog structure is the category. Of course the category serves as a way to organize the content and help visitors with navigation, but it also provides theme developers with opportunities to do some different things to make the theme a bit more distinct or more effective.

In this post we’ll take a look at a number of things you can do with WordPress coding that involve categories in one way or another. Hopefully this will be a helpful guide that you can refer to whenever you’re developing a new theme.

10 Excellent Sources for WordPress Design Inspiration

CSS galleries and collections of inspirational designs are nothing new to designers, but sometimes you may be looking specifically for examples of great WordPress themes. Whether you’re working on a theme to distribute to others or if you’re building a custom theme for your own site, it can sometimes help to look at examples of what others have been able to do with WordPress

We Love WP

The best, most up-to-date gallery for WordPress sites and blogs. We Love WP has been around for over a year and they have a ton of designs for your inspiration (in June they passed 1,000). And of course, you can also subscribe to their feed.

Enhanced Sidebars with Dynamic Content

After writing Effective Use of Blog Sidebars a couple of weeks ago I decided to look into the topic of dynamic sidebars. Typically, most blogs will us a standard sidebar for the entire site. WordPress users have a lot of potential functionality that is rarely used in terms of creating various sidebars and displaying them in different situations.

For example, when I was creating the theme for DesignM.ag I needed to have slightly different sidebars according to the category of the post. You can see the differences by looking at a standard blog post, a post in the community news category, and a post in the gallery category. For items in the news category I wanted a brief introductory paragraph with a button to submit news, followed by a list of recently published news items. On posts in the gallery I wanted the same thing, except for the gallery category instead of the news category. Posts in all other categories have a list of categories followed by recent news items. As a result there are three different left sidebars that are shown depending on the category of the post.

What Should Separate a Premium Theme from a Free Theme?

If you’ve spent any time at all looking around at WordPress themes that are available either for free or as a premium theme, you certainly know that there’s a very wide variety of quality available. Of course, that’s to be expected when you’re dealing with free themes. Anyone can create and distribute a theme for WordPress, which is one of the strengths of using WordPress as your CMS or blogging platform. However, that also means you’ll have to be careful when selecting a theme.

With the rise in popularity of premium themes and the increasing demand for them, the line between free theme and premium theme can be difficult to distinguish. I’ve read from a number of theme developers that have been unsure of how to distribute their theme, for free or for sale.

50 of the Best Church Website Designs

As far as web design is concerned, churches have come a long way in recent years. It wasn’t too many years ago that most church websites were several years behind the times. Apparently a growing number of churches today are recognizing the importance of their web presence.

This gallery isn’t only for those who design church sites; these examples are excellent sources of inspiration for any design project. Many of them involve excellent use of color, images, and graphics that draw attention right away. In addition, most church sites have a lot of content that needs to be displayed and easily navigated. The layouts and methods used here can be applied to other projects with similar requirements.

Here are some of my favorites. Let me know which ones you like in the comments.

Stonebriar Community Church

20 Specialty WordPress Themes

One of the primary reasons that WordPress is the platform of choice for most bloggers is the incredible variety of themes that are available for its users. With thousands of existing free and premium themes to choose from (and plenty of designers willing to create custom themes), there is no need to settle for a one-size-fits-all solution.

There are a growing number of specialty WordPress themes available that have been designed for specific industries or for specific types of websites. These specialty themes in combination with the CMS capabilities of WordPress provide businesses, website owners, and bloggers new and improved opportunities to quickly and easily build and manage an effective website with substantially lower costs than just about any other option.

Premium WordPress Themes and Plugins: Making WP a More Valuable CMS

Earlier today there was a post published at Smashing Magazine titled Premium WordPress Themes: Are They Here To Stay? The article looked at some of the leading premium themes that are available and posed some questions to readers: Have you ever considered releasing a premium WordPress theme? Would you consider using one? How much would you spend? They also asked if it’s time for premium WordPress plugins. I’d like to take a moment to respond to these questions, particularly the last one, because I feel this is a topic worth discussing for designers and WordPress users alike.

40 Resources for WordPress Theme Designers

One of the reasons WordPress is the most popular blogging platform is its theme system. WordPress allows its users with almost unlimited design options when modifying or designing themes. This is a collection of 40 resources that every theme designer can appreciate.
If you like getting design inspiration by looking at excellent blog designs, you’ll love [...]

Improve Your Look with a Customized WordPress Theme

One of the features of WordPress that is most appealing to bloggers is the theme system. With WordPress you can find literally thousands of free themes, pay for a premium theme, or design one yourself. Most bloggers choose free themes for obvious reasons. However, it can be difficult to stand out from all of the [...]