Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
IV
Before launching your quest for the perfect theme, it's important to do the planning up front so you
choose a theme you can live with for a while. Although no theme is permanent—you can change
your theme on a daily basis if you choose—chances are good your audience is more interested in
your changing content, not your changing color scheme.
Now let's begin our search.
The Difference Between Designers and Developers
In this chapter, we use the terms
designer
and
developer
interchangeably to describe a person
who creates WordPress themes. As you'll see in later chapters, themes are equal parts design
(styles and other presentational aspects of creating a website) and development (writing and
adapting PHP scripts to create page elements and bits of functionality).
One of the oddities of the Web's development is that many people who are talented graphics
designers were first asked to do
graphics
design for the Web—which, actually, is hell on earth for
most designers, as the Web is so limited and hard to control precisely compared with print. They
then got pulled into web
site
design—a whole other skill set that requires more business knowl-
edge, information architecture experience, and people skills. Some made the transition well; many
didn't. So check a designer's skills and experience against what you need before proceeding.
Although many theme designers also develop plug-ins, and plug-ins often handle design ele-
ments, we will use the term
developer
to talk about people who work with plug-ins. Unlike design-
ers, a developer is a developer—the skill set for different kinds of software developers isn't as
different as for Web versus graphics designers.
Finding Free Themes
The easiest way to select a theme (other than the default Kubrick theme or its Classic counterpart)
for your WordPress site is to take advantage of the Free Themes Directory. If you're into a more
adventurous approach to finding free themes, there are more than a few ways to go about it.
Finding and Installing Themes from the Free Themes
Directory
The Free Themes Directory at http://WordPress.org/extend/themes has been around since July
2008. About a year later, the themes and plug-ins directories were incorporated into the WordPress
Administration page, thus making finding and selecting themes as easy as clicking the Change
Theme button on the Dashboard. You are taken to the Manage Themes page shown in Figure 12.3,
where you can choose from three spots to open the theme search engine:
•
Click Add New Themes from the Appearance sidebar on the left.
•
Click the Add New button located next to the Manage Themes title.
•
Click Install Themes at the very top right of the screen, next to your username.
