Beginners Guide to Theme Creation?

Do you mean true beginner with WordPress all together or a beginner to creating a theme from scratch?

It’s highly recommended that if you’re just starting to work with themes, you work with pre-existing ones and modify them. This helps you a lot more in understanding the basics of what goes on in themes, what’s necessary, what isn’t, and the scale of what you’re able to do with them.

If you have already been doing this and want to take the leap from modifying to creation, well then, I’m in the same boat as you. I’d definitely like to take a crack at starting one from scratch with the help of some guidelines, since I’m not at the point where I can do it all on my own.

So, I’d be interested in some guides to this as well.

Before you even think about modifying themes, you’ll want to have an understanding of the languages that are used in them. So, I suggest you learn the basics of these:

http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp
http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp
http://www.w3schools.com/php/default.asp

You won’t need to worry so much about PHP, but that depends on what you want to do when modifying themes. If you just want to change the look of stuff (colour, font, width of a column, etc.), then you really only need to understand HTML and CSS. In terms of the actual functionality, that’s where PHP starts to come in. If I were you, I’d start by just changing the appearance of a theme and just play around with it so you get a better understanding of what you’re looking at.

It won’t come to you in one day, so keep that in mind. You really have to work with it and try to do as much as you can on your own. You learn a lot more that way. However, there are times when I just don’t quite have the knowledge required to do something and don’t know where to look. That’s where this support forum comes in.