We’ve been given the opportunity by Packt Publishing to read a great book on creating and / or customizing professional WordPress themes. The book is called WordPress Theme Design – A complete guide to creating professional WordPress Themes written by Tessa Blakeley Silver.
Tessa Blakeley Silver started out as a print designer and illustrator and evolved over the years into a web and multimedia developer, focusing on usability and interface design. Prior to establishing her own consulting and development company hyper3media (hyper-cube media) , she also worked as a VP of Interactive Technologies at eHigherEducation.
The focus of “WordPress Theme Design” is to provide a comprehensive guide on how to create a professional WordPress theme from the design process to search engine optimization (SEO) and after reading the book I can say it does more than that. It’s basically a compressed version of the WordPress Codex .
The book has 207 pages and it’s organized in 9 chapters : Getting Started as a WordPress Theme Designer, Theme Design and Approach, Coding it Up, Debugging and Validation, Your Theme in Action, WordPress Reference, Dynamic Menus and Interactive Elements, AJAX / Dynamic Content and Interactive Forms, Design Tips for Working with WordPress.
Chapter 1 : Getting Started as a WordPress Theme Designer introduces the WordPress platform and what tools and skills you need in order to start developing themes.
Chapter 2 : Theme Design and Approach focuses on the design part of the development process and gives advice regarding color schemes and graphic styles. Also it explains the author’s “Rapid Design Comping”.
Chapter 3 : Coding it Up guides you on transforming the HTML and CSS mockup from Chapter 2 and coding it into the WordPress PHP templates.
Chapter 4 : Debugging and Validation discusses basic techniques of debugging and validation covering W3C XHTML and CSS Validation and using Firefox and its extentions as a development tool.
Chapter 5 : Your Theme in Action focuses on setting up the CSS style sheet preparing your theme to be share with he world.
Chapter 6 : WordPress Reference covers on key information regardng the development, from the 2 CSS files that WordPress itself outputs to the WordPress PHP tag code including documentation regarding “The Loop”along with all WordPress functions.
Chapter 7 : Dynamic Menus and Interactive Elements focuses on enhancing your WordPress theme with dynamic menus using SuckerFish CSS based method and Adobe Flash media.
Chapter 8 : AJAX / Dynamic Content and Interactive Forms takes a look on how you can take advantage of AJAX techniques to customize your WordPress theme using plugins and widgets.
Chapter 9 : Design Tips for Working with WordPress provides somereally cool tips on how you can implement today’s coolest CSS tricks into your theme as well as some very useful SEO tips.
After reading this book we recommend it to anyone (especially since it’s not expensive) that wants to create professional WordPress themes and / or wants to make their WordPress theme unique.
We were able to provide you with a sample chapter which you can download from here.
