Wordpress Template – Getting Started With Theme Design

The best part about starting a Wordpress blog is that it slowly, but surely teaches bloggers how to do Wordpress theme design. This doesn’t mean bloggers suddenly get creative and become designers or tech-savvy geeks. On the contrary, running a WP blog offers an easy way to learn how to customize themes and templates with minimal knowledge of CSS, HTML and PHP.

For those wondering what all the fuss is about, here’s a few Wordpress statistics to wake you up – every new day, 500,000 posts and 400,000 comments are published on blogs hosted on Wordpress.com. The combined monthly readership of these blogs published in 120 languages exceeds 308 million people and 2.5 billion page views. Note that these are only the stats for blogs hosted on Wordpress.com, not including all the millions more that are self-hosted.

These are the ones that will probably want to customize the look and feel, functionality of their blog templates. Wordpress compartmentalization makes it very easy even for new bloggers with no clue about coding or how to use design tools. The template, system and functionality files are separated from each other, so any changes made to one of these doesn’t affect the other aspects of the blog. So a version upgrade that changes system files won’t spoil the look, and changes in the template files won’t affect functionality.

The Wordpress theme design files for each theme are located in the wp-content/themes/ folder. Apart from the main index.php template file and the stylesheet (style.css), the basic files to look for are the header, footer, comments and sidebar PHP files. So the header.php file can be modified to change the title and navigation, while footer.php modifies the bottom part below the main content.

The sidebar.php file can be modified to include things like the blogroll, links to archived and popular posts, latest comments, RSS or email subscription links and other widgets. The comments.php file can be modified to change how the comments look below the post. Again, note that making a change to one of these basic template files does not affect the rest. With the many wordpress template generators available these days, the task of creating websites is getting more and easier.

Now, many readers may be wondering why bother turning into a geek. Why not simply find a wordpress template designer or search around for a customized Wordpress template generator that looks good enough to use. You can and should get a wordpress template designer because it is very important to have a professional looking blog that makes it seem like the blogger actually knows a thing or two about blogging.

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