WordPress Theme Design by Tessa Blakeley Silver
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This book does a decent job teaching WordPress theme design. It walks you through wireframing, writing the HTML and CSS, and creating graphics, then building a WordPress theme from those pieces.
It’s mostly WordPress-specific, addressing the WordPress Loop, template files, template tags, widgets, and plugins. However, many other general web design topics are included, such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP.
It was published May 2008, so it’s written for WordPress 2.5, and some of the info is outdated. Understandably, many other references to “current” web design technology and trends are dated. There are several hacks for dealing with Internet Explorer 6, which are fortunately not as necessary with more standards-compliant versions of Internet Explorer 8 and 9. However, most of the examples and concepts are still valuable.
Notes
Design tips for WordPress
1. Create and keep lists: checklists, color lists, font lists, image treatment lists, etc.
2. Design for Firefox first, then fix for Internet Explorer.
3. Validate your HTML and CSS often.
• validate each chunk of code as you complete it
• visually check in several browsers
• use W3C validators to validate: W3C Markup Validation and W3C CSS Validation
• use Firefox’s Error Console to debug and validate JavaScript
4. Consider usability. It naturally lends itself to great design.
If necessary, assign multiple classes to a single HTML element for more flexible CSS targeting.
Use PHP include calls to modularize your theme. Put code to be reused into a new PHP file, then call it with <?php include(TEMPLATEPATH . '/page.php'); ?>
Use All in One SEO Pack plugin to generate metatags
Recommended web design websites
A List Apart
Smashing Magazine
