Custom WordPress Theme Design

Cameron has taken has one of my free themes as modded it to suit his needs and he did the right thing - he credited me for the original design and he released his version to the public

Was: JTk - Right Sidebar Mod is a modified version of the Was: JTk theme by JTk and Doc5. The theme has been modified to have the sidebar on the right instead of the left. It is my first publicly available theme modification.

You can get the the original here - and if you are interested there will be a 1.5 version of this theme release later this month.

I’ve made a couple of slight improvements to the Independence Day WordPress theme and have decided to call it version 1.5.

Hey Now, I am happy to announce version 1.2 of the Blue Meanie free WordPress theme. Blue Meanie is a free theme that Conlan and I released about a year ago - and it needed some attention… It’s a variable width, liquid layout, stretchable type theme that I’ve always liked and judging by the number of support questions I get about it - it’s fairly popular.

Check it out here.

When I “meet” prospective WordPress clients I often get asked the same questions, so I decided to do a little Q&A where I interview myself and post the answers in the hopes that they can get to know me a little better before they hire me to create their custom WordPress theme.

Q: Where are you located?
A: On Main Street in a small town in South Georgia - just North of the Florida border. The web development company that I co-founded in 2000 was sold a couple of years ago and we decided to move back to the old home town so that our children ( boy 6, girl 1.5 ) could get to know their extended family.

Q: Do you just do WordPress themes?
A: The short answer is yes, custom WordPress development is what I do day in and day out for a living. I also own a small store on the square here on Main Street but custom WordPress theme creation is what pays my bills and what I spend the vast majority of my professional time doing.

Q: What is your WordPress theme development process?
A: I’ll get some general info from the client such as suggested color schemes, colors to avoid, styles or sites that the client likes, number of columns, etc. I’ll do a mock up and the client tells me what he likes, doesn’t like, wants changed, etc. I don’t mind making changes, going back to the drawing board, whatever is needed within reason.

Eventually we get to a design that gets approved. I then cut it up and build a template on a staging site. Once we agree that the test site looks good we’ll settle up and I’ll zip up the theme and send it to the client so that he can install it on his installation of WordPress. If a client needs assistance setting up the theme I am happy to help with that as well.

All the WordPress themes that I create are valid xhtml with css layout assuring that my clients sites are created with the latest web standards, are highly accessible, and render correctly on the vast majority of platforms and browsers.

Q: Why WordPress?
A: WordPress is what you use when you want to create a dynamic website that is standards compliant, easy to use, and relatively simple to customize. While WordPress may not be the right solution for a huge enterprise, it is more than capable of managing the vast majority of web sites on the interweb. It seems to me that it is the right tool for the job most of the time.

Q: How long have you been doing this?
A: I have been creating custom WordPress themes for 3 years, I have been creating websites professionally, non-stop, for 14 years.

Q: What is the turn around time for a custom WordPress theme?
A: This fluctuates based on my workload, but the current timeframe is 14-17 days.

Q: Can you host my WordPress site for me?
A: Sure, and it will be hosted on the same machine that I host my own sites on so you can be assured that if there is a problem I will address it asap. I do hosting for WordPress clients for $45/year.

If you have any additional questions feel free to use the comments form below and I’ll answer and ad them to this Q&A.

In one of the more interesting WordPress jobs that I’ve even been involved in we created a custom WordPress theme for Inga for her new blog about “dress up games” - (Thinking) About Dress Up Games.

I had no idea that these little web games are so popular but there are hundreds ( thousands? ) of these games out there and Inga has had her other dress up games sites for a decade.

This project was a sucsess for a number of reasons, but first and for most Inga was very happy with the process and the final result.

This is just a heads up for anyone who might develop a WordPress theme - lets say that you have an excellent new WordPress theme and every one loves it and the client is happy and everything is fantastic, however the comments are not working.

You make sure that the installation of WP is not the trouble, you try the theme on a different domain, get the default copy of comments.php, a version of index.php that works, and nothing is fixing the problem.

The problem is that when someone tries to submit a comment they get a 404 page and the url is a big long string of variables, paths, etc.

Well, if you ever experience this problem, you probably have a form above the comments form that is not closed.

If you have this problem and find this blog post then you will probably solve your problem an hour faster then I solved mine. Lessoned learned? When something is not working, validate….

Sometimes I still get to do very fun WordPress themes - in between the corporate WP theme design and the people that want a clean, minimal WordPress theme I get a client or two who wants something fun and gives me a little room to create something.

That’s exactly what Jeff over at People You’ll See in Hell did, he gave me some time and creative freedom and we created something that we both liked. His dedicated audience has been decidedly positive as well.

The WordPress theme queue is getting full, the turn around time for WordPress themes is now 17-21 days. So if you need it absolutely, positively, this fortnight I won’t be able to help.

For all my current clients - the backlog is just about cleared, we have just finished a number of very cool WordPress themes ( details to follow ) and are a couple days from being back on schedule.

A number of big-time coders like The Ninja have had a hard-on for the WordPress codebase. I cannot count the times that I have been faced with geeks explaining to me that WordPress, and even more so, WordPress MU were just not suitable for high profile sites….

I think times, they are a changing. CNN Political Blogs are now using MU, and the blogs at ZDNet are using some flavor of WordPress.

Silent Bob blogs with WordPress, that should be enough for the Ninja by itself. Yahoo is using WordPress ( I know because they asked me to work with them on a WP project once, but that is another story…) and Sony trusts the PlayStation blog to WordPress.

Rolling Stone, NewYork Times, Delta Airlines? Check.

I am admittedly biased, but I think if these big-timers can trust their sites to WordPress, we can too.

One of the most powerful, but under-used features in WordPress is the Custom Fields features.

WordPress says:

WordPress has the ability to allow post authors to assign custom fields to a post. This arbitrary extra information is known as meta-data.

You can find the Custom Field entry form near the bottom of the Create New Post section of the administration backend, but to use it you will need to hack up your WordPress theme somewhat to get the data to show up. The data itself can be just about anything - your current location, mood, etc. - I have used it in the past so a client could include a photo thumbnail in each post at a specific place in his WordPress theme that was not possible through the standard post form.

This is the code that I used to impleiment the custom thumbnail:

<?php //get article_image (custom field) ?>
<?php $image = get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘article_image’, true); ?>

<img src="<?php echo $image; ?>" alt="<?php the_title(); ?>" />

My suggestion is that you check out the WordPress codex about the custom field but don’t get bogged down in the examples that they show you. You can do almost anything with this data so get creative and start using the WordPress Custom Fields!