There are officially one hundred billion WordPress Themes to choose from and some of them very good indeed, yet, and it’s a sad truth this, not one of ‘em is perfect enough to meet your exacting requirements. There’s only one way round it – create your own WordPress Theme.

Andrew’s WordPress Theme Design course is for people who are already familiar with HTML and CSS, as well as basic WordPress use.

Setting up a development environment

• Installing XAMP or MAMP
• About myPHPadmin
• About mySQL
• Understanding PHP
• Installing a local copy of WordPress

How WordPress themes work

• Template files and template hierarchy
• WordPress template tags
• The WordPress Loop
• Conditional tags
• Modifying pre-existing themes

Creating your own WordPress Theme

• Designing for WordPress
• Your theme folder
• Modularising your design
• Creating custom templates
• The funtions.php file
• Adding widgets and menus
• About custom fields
• WordPress taxonomises
• Search forms

Managing user access

• About user roles
• Managing users comments
• Setting up Author pages

Maintaining a WordPress Site

• Backing up your WordPress Installation
• Using Maintenance mode
• Migrating from a local server to remote