Have you ever wanted to try your hand at modifying or creating your own Wordpress themes? Maybe you thought it would be ridiculously hard to do or far beyond your scope of knowledge, but modifying Wordpress themes and templates are not quite as hard as you might think.

Do You Know Your HTML?

There are a few things you should take into consideration if you’re looking to get started modifying themes and that is, how good are your HTML skills? HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language and it is used in every webpage in order to be able to display your sites content. If you are new to HTML should have a look at basic tutorial that covers the basics of understanding HTML and how HTML markup tags are used to communicate your website and its design to your visitors.

HTML Tutorial For The Absolute Beginner

How Much PHP Do You Know?

Wordpress also relies heavily on php scripting in order for it to run…without php…no Wordpress, so make sure to at least have a mild working knowledge of the php scripting language and use it as a reference when designing your own themes. Here’s a really good step by step tutorial for those who are beginners with php:

PHP Tutorial For The Absolute Beginner

Don’t Leave Home Without Some CSS Skill

Lastly, you will need to have a good working knowledge of CSS which stands for Cascading Style Sheets. Every Wordpress theme and template has one. Without it your website HTML would be displayed with nothing but a white screen, and all of your text would be on the left hand side with blue highlighted links and that’s about it. There would be no graphics, no fancy fonts, no centering, nothing unless you specified it in your theme’s CSS file, if you had one. CSS is the partner-in-crime to the HTML coding of your theme, and you can’t have one without the other so make sure to add learn CSS to your list of things to do. The great news about CSS is that the learning curve is really small and once you’ve played around in a few Wordpress themes you will see that they all contain pretty much the same style elements so once you have the knowledge stored in your brain you will be good to go. Here’s a good CSS tutorial for the absolute beginner:

CSS Tutorial For The Absolute Beginner

Installing Wordpress Locally

One last thing you should take a look at is installing Wordpress locally on your computer. While it’s not absolutely necessary, it should be considered by anyone who is serious about working with, and modifying Wordpress themes and templates. Installing Wordpress locally on your computer will give you a playground to test your newly modified and newly created themes without having to put them up on the Internet, so nobody sees them but you. I myself tweak, modify, create and play with all sorts of Wordpress themes because I’ve installed Wordpress locally on my computer using a little program called XAMPP and my favourite text editor Notepad ++. I’ve written an excellent tutorial regarding how to set up Wordpress locally on your computer and you can check it out over at Squidoo by following this link:

Installing Wordpress Locally On Your Computer – A Squidoo Lens Tutorial

Please don’t be frightened by the length of the tutorial, it’s actually quite short once you take a good look at it. It contains very detailed step by step instructions that even the newest Wordpress user would have no trouble following.

Well that’s it, I hope you learn to make and modify Wordpress themes using these tips and you can send me an email anytime letting me know how you made out with these tips and especially the Squidoo lens. I will do my best to help you with any questions you might have and until next time people…have fun playing with Wordpress.

Related articles by Zemanta

• CSS is your friend (charity-lynn.com)

Now that you’ve gotten your blog up and running you’re probably already writing posts but some unusual anomalies have crept into your work. You’ve perhaps wondered why your text is not wrapping around your images? Or perhaps you find that you have oodles of whitespace to the right of your posts because your post text is not justified? Maybe you’re wondering why no-one is coming to your posts? Perhaps it’s due to the irrelevant title? Here’s a short list of ways you can style your Wordpress posts to address the most basic issues every blogger runs across when just starting out.

• Blog Posts Need Relevant Titles – Make sure your title is relevant to the post you’ve written or no-one will ever find it. So let’s say you wrote a fantastic article about “home stereo systems” then you should try to pull a relevant title from what you’ve written. For example, you’ve written a comparison guide for “home stereo systems” that includes features and prices, then a great title for your post could be “Features and Price Guide For Home Stereo System Buffs”. You might be saying to yourself, “Well isn’t it obvious that my post is about features and prices for home stereo systems?” and “What kind of moron would incorrectly title their blog post anyways?” Well, some posts you write will have a very clear and concise direction while others will be more like unfocused rants or just thoughts you’ve had about a certain subject and the title may not be so easy to come up with then. If the latter is the case, then trying to find the focus of an unfocused post can be somewhat challenging and it happens to us all. Take a moment and consider the subject matter of your post before coming up an irrelevant title and check out Copyblogger for some great tips on writing your best post titles.

• Post Images Need Relevant Titles – The way to title an image is there in the display window that comes up after you’ve uploaded the image. The default photo title will be the what the camera gave it or the name of the file you downloaded from the Internet. You will need to change it to something relevant to the photo if you want folks to find it. As an example, if you took a photo of a beautiful sunrise your camera has probably titled your photo something like “img1101.jpg”. You need to change the title in the image title field to read something like “beautiful sunrise”. After all, which do you think folks will search for on the Internet? Photos named “img1101″ or photos of “beautfiul sunrises”…it’s up to you…

• Wrap Text Around Wordpress Images – To make sure your text wraps nicely around your post photos…always set the photo alignment to left, right or center. You can do this from the display window that pops open after you’ve uploaded your image. If you find that even after setting the alignment your text is still now wrapping around the image, that’s because Wordpress changed the default image classes not too long ago and probably the template you’re using still uses the old image classes in the stylesheet. Add these codes to the style.css of the theme you are using:

img.alignright {float:right; margin:0 0 1em 1em}
img.alignleft {float:left; margin:0 1em 1em 0}
img.aligncenter {display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto}

• Always Use The HTML Editor Tab When Inserting Any Sort of HTML Codes Into Your Posts. – Why? Because the visual editor tab inside Wordpress will not convert your html codes to what you wanted it to do. Instead, your html codes will appear in your post exactly the way you inserted them using the visual editor. Switch to the html editor tab, insert your code, then switch back to the visual editor. Your post html should look like what you had intended and not the raw codes.

• Set The Alignment Of Your Post Text – You can align your post text left, right, or justified. Justified gives you the same amount of whitespace in between each left and right margin. You can do this two ways…the first way is to wrap your post writing in this source code < p style=”text-align: justify;” > or align it left or right, from inside the Wordpress post editor each and every time you write a post. Or you can fix this globally by adding:

text-align: left;
text-align: right;
text-align: justify;

to your style.css file at to automatically align text such as on page paragraphs and post paragraphs.

• Clear The Float Of Images You Add To Your Posts – If it ever happens (and it will) that you have an image that is longer than the text you want to put next to it, when you want to start a new paragraph the image will hang down over your next block of text. Your next paragraph or image will by default try to line up underneath the last block of text even if it throws off your entire post layout. Here’s how to fix this:

Enter this source code <div style=”clear:both;”></div> after your last paragraph (with the image) in the Wordpress editor and before the next text paragraph or image. This code will force your next paragraph to start below the last image length instead of the length of the short text you wrote beside it.

This is not an exhaustive list of how to style a Wordpress post, but it is an outline of the basic quirks that you will be sure to run into pretty much as soon as you write your first post…so keep this list handy as a reference and happy blogging.