What Brings Together Beaches, WordPress and Coffee?

Answer: They were all swimming around my head at 4 in the morning.

As you are all probably more than aware I like WordPress. It’s the engine that runs this blog, it’s used as the platform for a membership website that I have in development and was featured in my top 60 day challenge picks a couple of weeks ago.

What you probably don’t know however is that one of the things that really bugs me about WordPress is finding appropriate themes with the freedom to match my vision of a website. I have been known in the past to spend two hours simply looking for a correct theme to modify for a website.

Well a couple days ago I bought a product from the guys over at Location Independent that mentions skilling up. Though technically they were aiming their comments at people who have little to no experience in website design it still struck a chord with me. Sure I can build a ‘normal’ website in no time at all but when it comes to working with WordPress, my favorite engine, I have to spend a couple hours searching for an appropriate theme to meet my vision.

That was the moment that I decided I was going to go under the hood with WordPress. It’s perfect  now as I have a little free time at the moment and need a theme for WordPress that is completely away from anything that I’ve seen before. I jumped in with this amazing introduction to creating your own themes and realised that as long as you have the basics of HTML, CSS and PHP down it’s all about bringing them together.

Cut to last night; it’s 4am and I’m designing a travel theme with beaches, WordPress and a lot of coffee running around my brain.  It’s not yet finished but the design is perfected on paper and I’ve got a graphical mock up created on my computer. The whole thing should be ready by the end of next week or Sunday depending on how engrossed I get in it over the weekend.

Though I’ve strayed a little of course with this, the purpose of this post was basically to say that if you have knowledge of creating websites the transition to WordPress themes really isn’t as hard as it seems from the outside. CSS plays a huge part, a lot more than it typically has in my past designs but otherwise it’s very similar.

If you have an interest in WordPress, some background knowledge and a little time it’s worth spending on themes, even if only to get an understanding of what you’re working with. It will give you the ability to tweak under the hood a little more. As a side note, if you want to work on the web and don’t have the background knowledge, you will probably want to get a grasp of basic HTML/CSS so you can have a go at creating, editing or just developing a better understanding of the websites that you own.