Prelude Part 1: Setting Up Part 2: Set the Bare Bones Another great thing about the ET-Starter theme is that it allows you to easily set your header and background — whether it be an image, a color, or both. Just navigate to the "Appearance" menu on the left side of your WordPress admin page, and you can choose "Background" or "Header" and make the changes accordingly. If you are happy with just uploading a header, you can stop right here. If you want to know how I managed my header, read on...

Prelude Part 1: Setting Up Let's run through a checklist of things you should've done by now: installed WordPress in a web or local host imported content (whether from another blog or dummy content downloaded from the web) to your new blog chosen, downloaded, and installed a blank WP theme went through the PHP and CSS files in your blank theme to familiarize yourself with its setup If you have done these things, you should now have a blog that looks similar to this: Our new blog running the ET-Starter theme with the WP .XML Test Data Import dummy content Remember when I said in Part 1 of this series that one of the great things about the ET-Starter theme is that you can easily toggle between...

Now we get to the nitty gritty fun: developing your own WordPress theme! To make things a bit easier on myself — and for my readers so that they can see a live sample — I will detail how I built the theme I am currently using: (From now on I am going to assume that you have some knowledge of HTML and CSS. If you do not, I really, REALLY recommend that you learn! I truly believe that even a BASIC understanding of HTML and CSS will help you out tremendously as a blogger. Go check out W3Schools for some great tutorials. What about PHP — the language that WordPress is based on? You do not need to know PHP to build...

I promised to write about making your WordPress blog look the way you want...