Implementing your blog design

We've now considered the principles involved in designing our blog. The next thing to decide is how we actually carry out the design work. There are three main options available, each of which involves varying degrees of work. However, they all require knowledge of the design principles we just covered.

The first approach is probably the easiest; it simply involves finding a readymade theme and installing it in WordPress. By working through the earlier design principles, you should have an idea of what you want your blog to look like and then you simply need to find a theme that matches your vision as closely as possible. A good place to start looking is the official WordPress Free Themes Directory at http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/. You'll also find many more theme resources by running a search through Google.

There are hundreds of very attractive WordPress themes available for free and many others which you can pay for. However, if you adopt this approach to your blog design, you won't have a unique or original blog. The chances are the theme you choose will also be seen on many other blogs.

At the other end of the scale, in terms of workload, is designing your own theme from scratch. This is a fairly complicated and technical process, and is well beyond the scope of this chapter. In fact, it's a subject that requires its own book. If you intend to build your own theme, I recommend WordPress 2.8 Theme Design by Tessa Blakeley Silver ISBN 978-1-849510-08-0 published by Packt Publishing.

The third approach is to modify a readymade theme. You could do this with any theme you choose, even the default Twenty Ten theme that ships with WordPress. However, if you edit a fully developed theme, you spend a lot of time unpicking someone else's design work and you may still be left with elements that are not completely your own. A better method is to start with a theme framework, which has been specially designed to be a blank canvas for your own design. This is the approach we'll use in the case study later in the chapter.

In the case study later in this chapter, we will be using the Thematic theme framework built by Ian Stewart, who works for Automattic, the company that makes WordPress. The beauty of Thematic is that you can customize it just by modifying the CSS or stylesheets. You don't need to touch the other files that make up the theme, if you don't want to. However, you will need some understanding of CSS to achieve this, so before we begin with the case study, here's a crash course in CSS.