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.

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