My First Attempt At Theming WordPress: FreesiaFloralDesign.com
A week ago today, I got a phone call from my mother-in-law asking if I might be able to help her get her website working within a week. Things didn’t work out with her original website and it was going to be taken down within a week. Valentine’s day is fast approaching, and she needs a functional website. Now.
I’ve dabbled with the CSS on my own WordPress blog (though I never uploaded it to the server), but theming a website from scratch was a whole new animal. Could I do it?
I decided to say yes.
Building on WordPress has myriad advantages, not the least of which is empowering the client to be able to mange most of the content herself. Sure, you don’t want your client to do everything, but it’s nice when the developer/designer doesn’t have to log in to change spelling, add a paragraph, etc. I get to do the big things. She can do all the little details.
So where did I start?
Picking A Starting Theme
Like I said, I’ve dabbled with CSS before and HTML is not new to me, but I still had to pick a theme that gave me a basic menu and layout and was bare regarding all the color and other details. I chose to start with Thematic and go from there:
As you can see, there’s no color and it’s very minimalistic. Great.
I started to get to work looking at the CSS. My sincerest of apologies to the authors of the Thematic Theme Framework. I had no clue how to add a child theme, so I decided to butcher their default.css file since time was of the essence.
All of the tools I used were free, including:
- The developer tools for IE8 were particularly handy. Pressing F12 at any web page brings up the Developer Tools window, while pressing Ctrl+B allows you to click on any element and see what styles led to its rendering in the browser:
A few things I learned
One of the first things I learned was in regards to e-mail. If you have a hosted WordPress blog, a lot of hosted sites will only send mail that originates from the domain on which it is hosted. That means that if your site is www.benmccormack.com, the site will only send e-mails from an e-mail address ending with @benmccormack.com. It took me a while to figure why my e-mails weren’t sending from the site and I ended up using the WP Mail SMTP plugin to send the mail via SMTP, which her host required.
I also used Contact Form 7, which ended up being an excellent plugin for creating forms in WordPress. The javascript for the form creation was a little buggy in IE8, so I’d suggest creating the form using Firefox or another browser.
A finished product
Finishing a website is a wonderful thing. My mother-in-law is very happy to have a working website that she can update and presents her business in a professional manner. I still have a few things to tweak, but I would say this is a good start into the world of WordPress theming given I only had a week to pull it off:
Let me know your thoughts in the comments.