Editing Wordpress themes can be mighty tricky as I commented on in the previous post but if but if your dead set on designing a theme that suits all your needs and looks exactly how you want it to, there are ways. Option one is become professional in CSS which would be great in the long run but will take time. If you can’t wait that long and want to design your theme straight away you can use Dreamweaver. In my opinion Dreamweaver is the king in the want you see is what you get web design packages.
Wordpress uses template files to control the appearance of the website. The web-page is assembled of several PHP files controlling specific aspects of the site like header, sidebar, main content etc.
To use Dreamweaver to edit these themes you have to combine the different PHP files into one Dreamweaver document so you can view the site as your editing it. An important start of point is to work out which PHP files correspond with which part for example the index.php is the main page and the single.php is the individual post part.
Create a new folder and copy into is the style.css of the theme you are editing and the folder containing the images.
Open Dreamweaverand create a new HTML document then save it in the folder you’ve just created. Switch Dreamweaver so you your viewing it in code view and paste in the lines below:
<!– Header part goes here –> <!– /Header part ends here –> <!– Main content here –> <!– /Main content ends here –> <!– Sidebar content here –> <!– /Sidebar content ends here –> <!– Footer content here –> <!– /Footer content ends here –>
The Lines you have just copied into your HTML document are code comments and will help guide you to put the right PHP file in the right place. If you want a different sort lay out just swap the lines to suit your need. (more…)
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