Product Description

Expert guidance on designing a great theme for one of the most popular, open-source blog systems available for the Web today! This book can be used by WordPress users or visual designers (with no server-side scripting or programming experience) who are used to working with the common industry-standard tools like PhotoShop and Dreamweaver or other popular graphic, HTML, and text editors. Regardless of your web development skill-set or level, you'll be walked through the clear, step-by-step instructions, but familiarity with a broad range of web development skills and WordPress know-how will allow you to gain maximum benefit from this book.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #122758 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

About the Author
Tessa Blakeley Silver's background is in print design and traditional illustration. She evolved over the years into web and multi-media development, where she focuses on usability and interface design. Prior to starting her consulting and development company hyper3media (pronounced hyper-cube media) http://hyper3media.com, Tessa was the VP of Interactive Technologies at eHigherEducation, an online learning and technology company developing compelling multimedia simulations, interactions, and games that met online educational requirements like 508, AICC, and SCORM. She has also worked as a consultant and freelancer for J. Walter Thompson and The Diamond Trading Company (formerly known as DeBeers) and was a Design Specialist and Senior Associate for PricewaterhouseCoopers' East Region Marketing department. Tessa authors several design and web technology blogs. Joomla! Template Design is her first book.

Customer Reviews

High expectations
I purchased this book with high expectations. But gradually whilst skimming through the pages I found that a large portion of the book is showing you how to use css and xhtml, along with drop down menus etc.

I had hoped that more information was available about using wordpress rather than teaching you css and xhtml. There are a few tips that are useful, but I would not recommend this book to anyone with xhtml and css skills already looking to work with wordpress.

A book more focused towards teaching you wordpress functions for theme design etc might be more advisable.

Could do much, much better
When a book has a title like WordPress Theme Design, you expect its remit to be pretty specific: it should be about WordPress themes. Somewhere in this book there are a few useful tips on WordPress design, but largely, they're hidden under a lot of waffle and off-topic material which is better-covered elsewhere: much of it is, unfortunately, just another design book, and not a great one at that.

Chapter one, for example, begins with what you'll need. A browser, you say? I would never have guessed. Chapter two covers the author's personal design process, with particular reference to drawing a sketch of how you want the site to look first. If you've ever designed a website, you won't need this.

By chapter three, thank goodness, we finally get to a bit of WordPress: "coding it up". This is a walkthrough of creating a theme, and could be helpful to someone who'd never done it before and who was incapable of taking a look at Kubrick or WordPress Classic and seeing how they work. Together with chapter six's WP theme tags reference, we have the beginnings of something useful, but it's surrounded by an entire chapter on how to check your site in more than one browser, which is hardly specific to WordPress, and another two largely concerned with the author's dislike of dropdown menus and AJAX for forms.

I'm failing to see, really, who this book is aimed at. It clearly assumes basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, PHP and javascript, so it's not for total beginners. And yet vast chunks of it are far too basic to be aimed at experienced designers wanting to learn about techniques specific to WordPress. Crucial WP features like hooks and filters are omitted altogether. There is not one mention anywhere of even wp_head or wp_footer, so anyone producing themes according to this book is going to find lots of plugins will not work with them. And the exhortation to "read the Codex" for more advanced use of theme tags seems to undermine the whole purpose of the book.

At just 211 pages, this is a thin book. Add to that Ms Silver's waffley style, a fair amount of white space and several chapters that have almost nothing to do with WordPress, and the cover price seems excessive. I'd cheerfully pay for a book that helped me to write better WordPress themes, but I'm sorry to say that this is not that book.

wordpress theme design
I started devloping my websites using wordpress because of its nice clean code and easy to use interface. This book gave me just what I needed to complete my first major web design projct in wordpress. The book follows a single project from start to finish and provides a good understanding on how to develop using wordpress. Coming from a programming background this book fully met my needs and gave me a few interesting tips on the way. It is a bit thin but I think that is good.