biscuitWhen most people design/develop WordPress themes they usually bastardize a theme from WordPress’ free theme library. Some may even go to the extent of purchasing a “pro” theme so that they can be even closer to a final product. This is common practice and perfectly fine, I’ve done it many times with varying success. Most of the site design I do is in the WordPress environment. It’s revolutionized the way I design and develop sites. It’s faster, comes packaged with an amazing CMS, but above all, the SEO is impeccable. I found a easier way to emulate a non-WordPress site and cut the design/development time 75%.

I designed buttonpresser.com originally in XHTML. I had decided that a commitment to blogging was no longer in my cards. I saw the error in my ways and decided to add one later. I looked around for a theme that looked like something I could tweak into shape but it just wasn’t there. I started to hack up a very simple theme but it got confusing and my style sheet looked like a code version of “Dueling Banjo’s”. It was nasty and wasn’t working and I knew that it would take me a long time to get it functional. I scrapped it.

I took the page that I wanted to emulate and it’s style sheet and opened them in Dreamweaver. I took the default theme included in every WordPress install and opened header.php, index.php, sidebar.php, and the footer.php files. I spent the next hour putting code form my original file into the appropriate php file. I did a “save as” on my original style sheet and replace the WordPress theme’s stylesheet. Vwah Lah! A basic theme based off of my XHTML pages. Another hour of tweaking some of the other files such as comment.php, single.php, and category.php. and I was finished. It was logical, and was pulling my css from the beginning which made it so easy.