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 can follow--both regarding the design and the HTML/CSS build of your theme--that will make your job a lot easier.

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 layouts.

Note that, while these standard layouts have a differing number of columns, they all have these essential parts:

• Header
• Main column
• Side column(s)
• Footer

WordPress expects your theme to follow this pattern, and so, it provides functions that make your work easier. As you're designing your first blog theme...