Custom WordPress Theme Design

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….

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!

That’s right, I am offering all new Custom WordPress Theme design clients 6 months of free hosting on my personal server - and you can be sure that since it is on my personal server if something goes wrong it will be addressed immediately!

The server is very fast ( your site will load as fast as ImJTk.com ) and has been tuned specifically to run WordPress sites.

So bounce on over to my contact form and get on my calendar so that I can design you a kick ass WordPress theme and offer you free hosting until next summer.

Yes, I am selling Wide World of Food on Ebay this month so that I can focus on the business at hand.

WWoF has a Google Page Rank 4 and you get the domain name, the content, the custom theme ( a $500 value ), and 6 months of free hosting! Get all the benefits of having a topical niche blog without the headache of start-up. This blog can be a great addition to a blog network, or a fantastic marketing tool if you have anything to do with the food industry. Or it can be a interesting hobby if you just love food

Check it out here.

Allright, maybe not your mom, but one day my mom was doing her etsy thing and she read an article that was talking about how blogs can be an excellent marketing vehicle to get more people interested in your auctions and etsy sales.

I think this prompted her to get interested in what exactly I did for a living My mom sells a ton of stuff on ebay and etsy and has her own store here on the square in our little town, and now she wants a blog - and knows at least that I do something for a living that has something to do with that word.

So one night I went over and gave her the 30 minute WordPress tutorial and she caught on rather quickly and started writing some pretty good content. She was being very patient but I could tell that she wanted the custom theme that I had promised her done because she was so excited about WordPress.

So even though I am very busy creating custom WordPress themes for paying clients, I worked her theme in - I think it turned out well.

I think that one of the hardest things for new designers to learn when they try and make a living doing design is that it really does not matter what you, the designer, think is good.

It really only matter what the client wants - you can try and use your knowledge of form, function, color, and creativity to nudge the client in the right direction, but in the end a for hire design job is only really successful if the client thinks that they have gotten a good value and are happy with the results.

Take, for instance, my latest project for an awesome photographer out on the left coast named melissa schwartz.. She is a WPJA award winning wedding photojournalist and has a distinct style - and a design style that is not exactly what I would do if it were left up to me.

But her custom WordPress theme is not about me, it’s about her. So after being warned that she was an artist and had strong opinions about how the blog should look I tried to remove my own bias from process and created her a mock up. This is what she said:

i’m kind of shocked…i love it! i’m usually really difficult to please =)

I admit that I was kinda shocked as well, I was prepared to have it ripped to pieces and heading back to the drawing board. I went ahead and starting cutting it up, helped her install WordPress and got the theme set up and she said:

i think it’s amazing, it looks awesome, you rock.

Not bad coming from a client that told me up front that she was going to be hard to please - but, I think, that by trying to remove my ego from the design process that she actually became easy to please.

Last week I whipped out a cool blog theme for a great guy named Marc over at My Credit Group. While this design is not necessarily my favorite style is is exactly what the client wanted, and therefore, a successful project.

I normally don’t blog each WordPress Theme I create ( otherwise that is all this blog would be about ) but this blog may be special - but not because of anything that I’ve done. I think this blog has the potential to have the best content created by the client of any theme that I have ever designed.

Marc has some great credit related content over there, not just the standard fluff, and it looks like there is a nice discussion building around his timely topics.

So if are interested in this type of thing, I highly recommend that you check it out.