A Web Design Community curated by Chris Coyier

#25: Designing for WordPress: Part One

By: Chris Coyier on: 11/15/2008 with 48 Comments

WordPress is a hugely popular CMS for blogging. The blog section of CSS-Tricks is run on WordPress and I am very happy with it. By popular request, we are going to walk through designing for WordPress. In part one, we will be downloading and installing WordPress. Then we will install the “Starkers” theme by Elliot Jay Stocks to start with a completely fresh slate for our new design. No sense starting with the default theme, it’s more trouble than it’s worth! In part two, we will go over the theory behind designing for WordPress and how it’s much like “working modularly” and actually get started designing. In part three, we will finish up the design and start in with some more advanced functionality.

Running time: 16 minutes

Direct Download: High Quality, Quicktime .M4V Format (AppleTV Ready)

Links from video:

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48 Responses

  1. Michael says:
    11/15/2008 at 10:54 am

    Chris great tutorial as always keep them coming however why didnt you setup the site on a local host?

  2. chriscoyier says:
    11/19/2008 at 2:25 am

    Good idea, I added those links. There is also a home-base style post here:
    http://css-tricks.com/designing-for-wordpress-com...

  3. Web Design Company in Mumbai says:
    11/19/2008 at 8:31 am

    A quick suggestion would be if you could add links to the part two, three…. here that way we can bookmark this page and use it as a reference for anyone wanting to learn how to design a WP theme…

    Anyways.. this is a great resource.

    Thanks
    Alexander Gounder

  4. chriscoyier says:
    11/23/2008 at 3:42 am

    Thanks, fixed that.

  5. Mikael Rieck says:
    11/23/2008 at 9:57 am

    Chris, your link to part three links to part two ;)

  6. luan says:
    12/16/2008 at 1:45 pm

    hi. i’m new to webdesign. quick quesiton, how do I sign up for joyent is it free. I tried to sign up for the open social developers. Is that what I want? sorry.

  7. stickybomb says:
    01/01/2009 at 5:52 am

    great tutorials for wordpress beginners man. Quick question though kind of off-topic what app or extension do you have installed on your mac that displays the download completed msgs?

  8. JJ says:
    01/06/2009 at 10:05 pm

    Hey Chris,

    Thanks for the awesome tutorial videos. I am learning tons from them. The WordPress ones have really peaked my interests though with my new website I am wanting to create.

    I have a small question though. I have installed WordPress on my server; I get to the screen where it generates that random password and then I click on the Login button where it is supposed to take me to the actual login screen but nothing comes up. I even try clicking on the index page after and nothing comes up there either. Have you ever heard of this problem. Is this a server side problem?

    Thanks for your help and I really appreciate you making those great videos.

  9. Scott says:
    01/07/2009 at 11:11 am

    Could you place a link to your videos on Youtube so I can watch them from my iPhone?
    Thanks.

  10. Jennifer Eden Cruz says:
    01/26/2009 at 8:33 am

    Hi,

    That’s really a great tutorial. Can’t wait to see the next one! This will really help a lot in building a home based business

  11. Ben says:
    01/29/2009 at 4:51 am

    Thanks a bunch for these videos mate.

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