Support » Themes and Templates » Custom themes?

  • I was wondering if anyone here had suggestions for a good custom theme creator. Unfortunately, I’m not looking to spend a great deal of money, so that’s going to hurt me. Fortunately, I do know what I want, I just don’t have the time/inclination to create it myself. My site is very simple (it’s all static pages, no blog), there’s little to no artwork to do (I already have a logo), and I don’t need a complicated look.

    Does anyone know of a good service for this sort of thing, or is there someone here who could help me out?

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  • Isn’t there anything at wordpress.org/extend/themes?
    There’s so many themes out there (there and elsewhere) and with your minimal requirements there has to be a theme that is the way you want, or you can make it with little effort (change logo and a bit of colours is quite easy).

    There’s a free theme generator HERE. I’ve never used it so I have no idea if it works or not or how well it works.

    If you have a fairly simple theme plan, I say go for it (and let us know how it works please?), but if you want something more complicated in mind…

    In spite of me linking you to the program, your best bet IMHO is, like Gangleri said, to:

    1. peruse the library of themes given in the link (and there are a LOT of really nice themes of all colors, layouts, and sizes) and find one that is closest to what you want and just leave it as it is,

    or

    2. once after installing the theme that suits you best, to fiddle with the files and change the colors and header image (and whatever else) to display how you would like it to,

    or

    3. ‘hire’ someone to do the code alterations for you.

    I suggest this because:

    It is of my opinion that WordPress is a bit notorious for being more difficult to stylize/theme from scratch and this is coming from a front-end web developer who’s done this sort of thing for several years.

    To really be able to create your own theme from scratch, you need to understand PHP, WP-specific coding, and XHTML and CSS. More importantly, you need to understand how it all works together.

    Additionally, WordPress is not just a landing page like MySpace is. WordPress is a whole site – the whole kit and kaboodle – and you have access to everything and will have to stylize everything if you want the site appearance to stay consistent.

    For this reason, I believe that a theme generator for MySpace or Livejournal is not the same as a theme generator for WordPress. A theme generator for WordPress has more files and more coding to work with and the potential to mess things up or to forget to style something consistently is higher.

    Not to say that the generator doesn’t work because it sure might!

    I just happen to feel that utilizing someone else’s theme (which has been safely debugged for public use and distribution) and/or making necessary changes is more foolproof and probably will have a better overall personalized feel to it.

    … But of course I could be wrong.

    Thread Starter dignan17

    (@dignan17)

    Thanks guys.

    I definitely understand where you’re coming from, but there’s a few things to consider:

    1) I’m running a small business, and have very little time to work on my theme.

    2) I want a simple theme, but there’s absolutely nothing in the WordPress theme database that fits my needs. Seriously, I’ve looked through hundreds and none of them are even close. Look through them sometime and notice how few themes are both simple AND attractive. None, IMO.

    3) Even if I did find one that I liked, it’s not as easy as you say to alter it slightly. It takes a lot of work, and things get broken in the process.

    4) I’ve tried the theme generator, and it “works.” It creates a really ugly theme. In my case, it also created a seriously ugly menu at the bottom of my pages that it offered me no option to get rid of. Very annoying.

    The fact is that I know exactly what I want my theme to look like, but I don’t have the familiarity with WordPress theme creation to get it to look like that. I have some basic knowledge in all the areas needed to create a WordPress theme, but I don’t have the time or the graphic arts skills to get it done.

    Post your request to the wp-pro mailing list and ask for quotes after you describe your needs.

    http://lists.automattic.com/mailman/listinfo/wp-pro

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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