Welcome! WordPress themes are one of the first and most important topics that one must understand to be good at WordPress development. Themes underlie the entire visual half of WordPress site, but often grow to do even more. We’re hoping your find these free content very helpful, as we think it covers some of the most important concepts in doing WordPress theme development for yourself.

Typography is maybe the cornerstone of attractive web design, as I like to remind myself with the screenshots I took of highly reputable websites like the New England Journal of Medicine converted to Comic Sans.

I was browsing around yesterday looking for topics to write about in WordPress and I came across someone asking a question that is kind of common: What’s a theme framework? Is _s one? Is Genesis? What about X Theme?

I have a confession to make: for a long time I’ve been scared of Genesis.

Some of the best features of WordPress are the ways in which any user, once he or she learned the WordPress interface, can quickly change complex site features. Sidebar widgets are a great example — and one which is increasingly used and useful across many other areas of a WordPress site besides the sidebar. With a little dragging-and-dropping, you can quickly and easily change the appearance of your site.

Widgets are a powerful part of WordPress, and they’re a great way to enhance your site’s sidebar. Or your footer. Or your homepage. Or another part of your site that your theme maker thinks would look really good with some widgets.

If you’re like a lot of WordPress users, you’re always hitting walls. You can manage your site: write content, upload photos, even add new contributors. What you can’t do is customize it. You wish you didn’t have to call up a developer to perform miracles like the following:

One of the easiest mistakes to make when you first start to make WordPress themes is duplication. It’s one of the simplest and most complicated lesson of making good software anywhere, really. Duplicating code with a quick copy and paste is super easy, and in the short term you feel really efficient — look at all these things I’ve accomplished quickly.

As a very powerful, well-documented, and relatively user-friendly CMS, WordPress attracts a lot of do-it-yourself energy.