Blog Design 101: WordPress Theme/Template Design (Part 1)

There are probably over 1000 free WordPress blog themes/templates out there. Yet, I still get people who write and ask me to help them design their own. And that’s cool. After all, it’s a great way to express one’s creativity. This post marks the first in a series to help you do just that: create your own WordPress blog theme. Before we get into WordPress blog/theme design, however, we need to talk a little bit about WordPress itself.

Database-Driven Websites (AKA Push-Button Publishing)

WordPress, like most blogging platforms, is a “database-driven” web publishing platform. In other words, all of your blog’s content is stored in a database in the form of, well, data. The database merely acts as a repository for all the information you add to your WordPress site. That includes blog posts, blog comments, blog categories, the title of your blog and a whole slew of other information. Most people, me included, would say that database driven websites are a key characteristic of Web 2.0 websites.

Compare that to Web 1.0 websites. When I first started designing sites in 1999, I used a program called Microsoft Frontpage. With Frontpage, I would create a web page that contained all the data I wanted to appear on that page. At the same time, I’d also create the look and layout - or the design - of the page with Frontpage. Then I’d have to upload that page to my webhost and link to it somehow from the other pages on my website.

If I wanted to change the look or layout of the page, or if I wanted to add something to the page, I’d have to do it with Frontpage and then upload the new page all over again. That’s not such a big deal if you’re only changing one page, but if you wanted to change the look of your entire site, it could be pretty time-consuming and costly. Most bloggers I know have hundreds of pages on their site. Some have thousands!

With database-driven sites, the design and the content are separate. Again, the data resides in the database on your web server/web host, and the template files (or theme) tell WordPress and the web browser how to organize and present that information to your website/blog visitor. If you want to change the look or layout of your entire site, all you have to do is change a few template files rather than every page on your site. For example, if you wanted to add a photo of yourself to your blog’s sidebar, all you’d have to do is go into the template file for your blog’s sidebar, add the HTML code for the photo, then save the template. And like magic, your photo would then show up on each page of your site that has a sidebar.

Database driven sites, such as WordPress are a glorious thing. It truly is push-button publishing at its best. If you want to add something to your website, just enter some information in a few fields, push a button and it’s instantly live on your site looking just the way you want it to look.

I hope I made all that clear enough for you to understand database driven websites. If not, feel free to comment with questions. In part 2 of this series, I’ll talk specifically about WordPress themes. We’ll cover the various template files that make up a WordPress theme and get you started creating your first theme.

Go to part 2 of this series.