How To Create Your Own free Wordpress Theme

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Tutorial Introduction:

Back in 2005, I wrote a little tutorial for Wordpress 1.5 on how to integrate wordpress with an existing website. Since then, with the release of Wordpress 2.x, working with Wordpress has become even easier. This tutorial is an update to my original tutorial and as it appears under a different name, I want to take a moment to clarify who this tutorial is for.

This tutorial is especially for:

1. People interested in learning how to build a Wordpress theme from scratch or, more specifically, for those interested in taking an existing design and converting it into a beautifully working Wordpress theme.

2. People interested in integrating Wordpress with their existing website. As touched on lightly in my first tutorial, the best way to go about integration, in my experience, is to take your existing website and build a Wordpress theme out of it, then apply that theme to your Wordpress blog and voila, if all has gone well you have a perfect integration. It can require some handiness with CSS, but the principles covered in this tutorial will get you well on your way.

Extra Note on Wordpress Integration:

As questions on integration are the ones I receive most often, I’ll take a few more moments to make sure your options are clear. In my experience, there are two ways to integrate Wordpress with an existing website:

• One, you can install Wordpress, write your posts, and then use PHP or Javascript to integrate the feed directly into your existing design. The drawback with this is if you want to include any links in the feed (for example, to read the rest of the post or add comments). If they click a link, it has to take them somewhere and by default they’ll go to your installation of Wordpress which will most likely look nothing like your existing website.
• Two, you can take your existing design, tables or CSS, and create a Wordpress theme that matches your site exactly. Then, apply it to your Wordpress installation and you can now have a “/blog” (or whatever you decide to use Wordpress for) that looks and feels exactly like your website. Thus, while it doesn’t actually sound like an integration, the result for your end users is the same: you’ve added the functionality of Wordpress without sacrificing your design and now offer your users added functionality with total continuity.Note: While you can easily stop at “integrating” a simple blog, Wordpress is able to do a whole lot more. For a number of my clients and my own personal projects, Wordpress works excellently as a complete CMS (Content Management System), even for sites that look nothing like a blog.