I have used Wordpress for as far back as I can remember. As probably the most renowned and well-reputed CMS (Content Management System) offered on the Internet, that shouldn’t come as a surprise. In fact, I would be more surprised if I came across a website developer who wasn’t familiar with the application. All websites, and particularly those owned by business brands, require frequent content updates. WordPress, using an ISP provision such as the Frontier Internet Packages service, makes this happen easily. Specifically, it eases the delivery and modification of new & existing content for your website. This allows you to retain your website’s primary code, and only alter its outward aesthetics. Changing WordPress templates, or themes, is one of the most prominent ways of doing this.
In this post, I’m going to neatly explain how you can create your own WordPress theme in only a matter of minutes. For this you’ll require some existing material, such as an HTML or a CSS template file. This will serve as base on which you can make further modifications to suit your styling preferences. In time, and after you’re done creating some basic templates, you can progress onto more complex styling tasks. In this way, you can create an endless variety of engaging themes for all your web platforms.
Pretty cool, right?
A Step-by-Step Guide
Carry out the following easy steps to build your very own WordPress template today:
- For starters, you’ll need to search for and save some CSS and HTML theme-templates from the Internet. A good way to do this would be to conduct a quick Google Images search. Alternatively, you can pay for a number of skillfully designed, customized themes on sites like themeforest.net.
- Make a new folder in the ‘wp-content/themes’ directory, and name it with easy-to-remember initials like ‘mycustomtheme’ – or something that sounds catchy inside your head.
- Once the folder is ready, copy and paste the HTML and CSS template files, as well as images, and insert a comment to the top of the CSS style file name. This can be done by renaming the ‘index.html’ file extension to ‘index.php’.
- Right click on the renamed file, and open it for editing.
- In the text/code editor, replace the template’s static coding with PHP snippets. This step will enable automatic dynamic content extraction from existing WordPress directories.
- Make a new file in the folder named ‘functions.php’. Once done, make use of the wp_enqueue_style() function to load your chosen theme’s frames.
- And you’re all set!
A Little Practice Goes a Long Way
The short tutorial listed above only tries to explain a very simple way of creating your own WordPress templates. And it goes without saying that a little practice and experimentation goes a long way in making you more technically equipped. For creating more sophisticated theme-templates.
When designing my own client themes using this method, I take care to keep a packed repository of default templates ready on my computer. Having this storehouse of images greatly reduces the time it takes to load a newly built WordPress template for your websites. And this pro-tip comes in particularly handy where you’re on a strict time-budget from your business contractors.
As you grow with experience, you can start inserting more rich PHP snippets into your themes. These help to endow your websites with more interactive media content. And since purely text-based websites are highly inefficient in ensuring customer conversions (from a business perspective), the benefits of this approach seem obvious. It isn’t long, actually, before dealing with rich multimedia content becomes the mainstay of your website optimization efforts.
Get Some Backend ‘Tweaking’ Done for More Customized Effects
Sometimes, you need more than the default template designs offered by your website hosting company and server. For this, you need to resort to the services of a backend developer to make some changes on the coding end. These modifications are primarily oriented towards how you (or your client) would like your concerned website to appear. Would simple multimedia content additions suffice for your promotional purposes? Or are you interested in adding more complex styling features – like carousels, audio-only blurbs, in-text (affiliate marketing) snippets, or even video-conferencing boxes.
Luckily, YouTube contains many interesting video tutorials that teach new WordPress-geared styling techniques for free. Being a self-learner, I often spend some time learning all sorts of new tricks and hacks from these instructional videos through my Frontier Internet Plansplan. And you can do too – if this is how you choose to make a living for yourself. In which case, the process of constantly learning new ways to tweak your website files becomes a priority concern.
Author Bio: Stephen N. Mills is an entrepreneur, marketer, and writer. As San Francisco resident, he loves reading books and writing on different topics like SEO, Branding, Health and etc. That's where he finds his inspiration to author in-depth guides that teach E-commerce store owners ways to manage, grow and scale their business. In a former life, Stephen co-founded a custom menswear company which generates 6-figures in annual revenue through its website and retail
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