Setting up your design

Just about any design in the world can be turned into a WordPress theme. However, there are some general guidelines you should follow—regarding both the design and the HTML/CSS build of your theme.

Designing your theme to be WordPress-friendly

While you can design your blog any way you want, a good starting point would be with one of the standard blog layout, as shown in the following screenshot:

Note that, while these standard layouts have a differing number of columns, most of them have the following essential parts:

• A header
• A main column
• A side column(s)
• A footer

WordPress expects your theme to follow this pattern, for the most part. While you can be creative and not include one or more...