I finally had a chance to get back to working on the practice theme. Yeah, I’m just practicing with this one as I want to create one that I like better. Maybe someone will actually want to use the one I create. Who knows. Anyway, I discovered some problems as follows:

• I decided I had to start over with the WordPress code & use what was provided on ThemeTation.com. Otherwise, the code wouldn’t match the theme.
• The author forgot the DOCTYPE and head information in the header file.
• The author didn’t show users how to create a theme name in the style.css file.
• There were no instructions on how to put the style.css file together, upload all the files and make it all work.
• The author didn’t include a link to home in the navigation.
• The author included comments in many of his files using the wrong comment tags which caused the comments to appear on the site.
• I had to make a number of CSS mod’s to make the theme display correctly.
• The finished theme code provided by the author is different than what’s provided in the tutorial!
• The author forgot to include the header.php in single.php, page.php and other pages.
• The author had the div’s messed up causing the sidebar to appear at the bottom of pages & posts.
• There was no 404 error page.
• The content container (div) overlaps the header.
• There was no sidebar on the search results page.
• I added a pointer for the “Go” button on the search bar.

Well, I guess that’s about it. I learned a lot from going through this process. Most importantly, writing my own code for a theme would be a challenge as I’m not a PHP coder. I can use the standard WordPress files and modify them for a useful theme. Creating the graphics wasn’t too hard but I’m sure it will be more of a challenge to do it on my own. Slicing and dicing the graphics was a bit of a challenge. Writing a complete stylesheet will be a challenge. But, you don’t learn anything by copying and pasting. Get busy!

You can check out the finished theme here: High FX Test.com. I’ll leave the theme up for a while. Sometime in the near future I’ll get started on my own theme.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that you shouldn’t use a photo of yourself for testing. You’ll get tired of seeing your ugly mug all over the place!

Tags: create a WordPress theme, premium WordPress theme, web site help, WordPress help