Building Your Own Web 2.0 Wordpress Theme

So you have setup your wordpress blog and installed a great web 2.0 wordpress theme on it. But now you want to make your blog different from other blogs using that same theme. You want to give your wordpress theme a totally unique identity that matches your content and personality. There is good news for you. Although a bit of technical know-how is required for modifying the template files associated with a theme, the task can be accomplished easily enough. And it is not really as difficult as it sounds with all that talk of CSS, PHP and HTML!

But Why Should I Build My Own Wordpress Theme?

You may come up with this question and say that you are perfectly happy with the free theme you downloaded from the internet, exactly as it is. But what if you suddenly come across a friend’s blog with the exact same skin on it? Same images, same fonts and colors, same functionalities on the side bar! Won’t you feel like marking your wordpress blog theme with your own special identity, even if the basic template remains the same? Customizing your web 2.0 wordpress theme can have several advantages.

1. First, of course, it gives a unique look to your Wordpress site.
2. Secondly, you can take advantage of the existing templates, template tags, as well as the Wordpress loop, for the generation of different kinds of web page results and looks.
3. With customized themes, you can create alternative templates for specific site features; for example, the category pages, search result pages and static content pages.
4. You can provide for a theme or style switcher, so that your users can easily change the look of your site or quickly switch between two different site layouts.
5. You can even design your own web 2.0 wordpress theme and release it to the public so that others may also enjoy your design.

Important Wordpress Template Files

1. header.php – This is the file that takes care of the way the top section of your blog appears. This is the file from where you can change the header picture and add Meta tags.
2. footer.php – This file stores the HTML code for the bottom section of your blog, and gets reloaded each time a page or post in your blog is accessed.
3. sidebar.php – The section on the side of the page, which usually takes care of the site navigation through various links to archives, previous posts, blogroll and latest posts, depending upon the basic web 2.0 wordpress theme being used.
4. index.php – This is the main template file in a wordpress theme. It determines what a visitor gets to see when he lands on the homepage of your blog or site. If you want to display your web space as a website instead of a blog, then this is the file wherein you need to put some static content.

Apart from these files, a web 2.0 wordpress theme also has some other template files meant for specific purposes, like the “archives.php” file, that would display the previous posts in your blog, and the “search.php”, that can be used to customize how to generate search results from your site.




Richard Bulla share his views about Wordpress Theme and its features. For more information on Free Wordpress Theme, please visit www.wordpressthemes.weblogs.us