Building Your Own WordPress Theme – Intro

This week I'm going to be trying something new.

Along with my regular posting (which should be back in full swing starting tomorrow) I'll be running a series dedicated to building a custom WordPress theme from scratch. Earlier tonight I started diagramming a basic theme and added some details that I can use to get started. While I didn't spend too much time on some of the specifics the basic blocking is in place and the concept for the theme is pretty well cemented. Today I just wanted to go over some of the beginning portion of planning that was involved.

Finding Inspiration

I've been wanting to do a darker theme for awhile now. Black themes with splashes of color can be really appealing and can make certain aspects of a page jump. After playing around in GIMP for about an hour I came up with the rough design you see below. With a little influence from the Democracy player I found a decent balance for breaking up the content.

There's still some tweaking to be done but as I get into the CSS more of the details will come together. In tomorrow's post we'll start setting up the basic files needed to put the theme together.