motstudio

Additionally, if your files are all read-only, open up the files on your local harddisk and click on the ‘Properties’ and UNcheck mark the box that makes the file read-only and then upload the newly writable files to your theme folder on your WP site.

And one more thing – if you edit the file names, you need to edit the code that points to the file name. Unless you’re doing some really complex stuff with your WP installation, I suggest LEAVING the index.php file named as index.php and LEAVING the style.css file named as style.css.

… You mean a horizontal bar that you can put links on and stuff like the horizontal bar on the site you linked to?

If so, then you’re not looking for a widget – you’re looking for a header bar of some sort and that can be added in with CSS coding right after the header information.

I wish I could read Dutch because it all looks like something interesting to read, but that looks really nice!

Visually, it looks very rich and I think you did a good job balancing the color scheme and graphics. Vibrant, yet not too hard on the eyes (though some might disagree?).

However, my one word of warning is also about the graphics.

The site navigation is very much GUI versus textual and coding-only/mostly links and to rely so much on the graphics to guide people around means that if the graphics fail to load for some reason or if the graphics take too long to load (I am running DSL and your site took a bit to load), then the look and purpose of the site – along with its navigation – vanishes.

For a personal website, this might not be much of an issue if any, but for a professional site, this might be something to be concerned about.

So.

Really nice design but a word of warning on loading time and ‘what if’ in regards to the site being so graphics-heavy.

You don’t need special software and as long as the WordPress theme author doesn’t disallow it (I have yet to see one who has), you can most certainly upload a pre-existing WordPress theme and work directly from it, tweaking and adjusting to fit your needs.

Where a lot of WordPress themes do use a lot of images for their backgrounds, headers, footers, and whatnot, a LOT of the effects are all CSS code-based, so to really handle editing a theme well, it definitely helps to understand and be able to code CSS.

For various code-related reasons, theming WordPress is more difficult than theming something like MySpace. What makes WordPress do what it does and look how it looks is, for the most part, code. Lots and lots of code.

With that said, unless you have prior front-end web coding abilities and a good understanding of PHP of WP-specific coding, it is easier to use someone else’s theme and work from it/tweak it and learn from it than to just dive straight into theming your own theme from scratch.

My recommendation is to find a good theme that you feel suits what you want best – general layout, maybe even colors – and then tweak it to suit.

Good luck!

Without looking at the coding, I can’t be too sure what the problem is, BUT from what you’ve said, it sounds like to me your footer is having a problem – and excuse the pun – clearing some hurdles of the div nature.

I say this because your footer is following the flow of your content rather than just staying at the foot where it should.

Try this:

Create a div in the stylesheet.css to contain the footer and only the footer and make the div as wide as your WP page (content and sidebars included).

This is what’s keeping my footer from walking around my theme:

.clear {
        clear: both;
}

and

#footer-wrap {
	background: #111111;
}

#footer {
	width: 750px;
	margin: 0 auto;
	padding: 20px 0;
	font:normal 10px/10px Verdana, Tahoma;
	text-align: center;
        color: #EFE074;
}

The .clear is to make my footer clear/be posted after the contents and sidebar.

The #footer-wrap is a container for the footer div and I use it to set the background color of my footer bar.

The #footer itself and its info contained within is set to the width of my site contents (sidebar included) and this prevents the footer from appearing directly following either my posted content or sidebar.

When you write the code on footer.php page, you need to call them in the order of: .clear, #footer-wrap, and #footer.

If doing the following doesn’t help, post your footer code from the stylesheet.css and the footer code from footer.php and maybe we can help you get your footer from walking off.

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.