My own WordPress theme

Until today I have used a good free WordPress Theme created by l2aelba. The theme is old and both html, css and php functions are far from optimal. As a web developer, I obviously can not live with that. I need perfect html and css on my own WordPress blog. As if anyone could achieve the perfect, but I obviously try creating it every time. Another problem I have is maintenance. One thing is that my current WordPress Theme is of somewhat older date and html and css is complicated. Something else is obviously that I have not made it my self. In order to correct and improve, I need to know what I’m doing.

How?

I’m going to use a tutorial, to secure a solid knowledge of all the necessary topics. I googled the WordPress theme subject and found this tutorial at themeshaper . It looks very advanced and will probably show me all the things I need to know.

Toughts and fact of my chosen tutorial

The tutorial takes me from scratch and helps me build a good basic html, split up into the standard WordPress theme files. It is structured in a number of steps, where each step becomes more sophisticated. There are some super good explanations along the way explaining the different choices you make as you go. Short and concise explanations. Lovely. Another thing this tutorial is very focused on is SEO. It ensures that the most important thing on the blog, such as a post header, will be the dominating text on the blog. Details to help people with screen readers are also taken seriously.

I did it

After going through the tutorial I am now finished with my own WordPress theme and the result can be seen on this blog. Visually, very little has changed as I used many of the same styles as before. But I am now much happier with my HTML and CSS. The site is also super optimized enabeling me to change the looks completely with only a few changes in the css. By optimizing the css I’ve gone from just under 22,244 characters css code to only 6,654. In this count I have cut all the comments out of code both before and after the code. With HTML, I have removed many unnecessary tags and made a more simple and logical structure.

Conclution

It is relatively easy to make your own WordPress theme. But it will not be something I will be doing from scratch many times. Now I have a good default settings on my own blog, which, should I need it, I can reuse at many other blogs.