jiahadye

Trust me, it’s in there. But in the interest of getting you on track, I’ll lend a hand 🙂

To start with – you’ll have to have WP set up and ready to go, you’ll need some HTML & CSS knowledge, and some basic understanding of PHP. If you don’t have any of this, it might be worth hiring someone else to do it for you!

What you’re looking for is the WordPress Loop – it’s a block of PHP that you insert into you template file and it spews out a number (that you can set in the admin) of posts onto your homepage.

To get a basic elements in place you’ll need to edit a few of the template files; Header.php, Footer.php Index.php, Page.php (if you want more then just a homepage) and Single.php (and, if you’re up to it, 404.php, Archive.php, Tag.php etc, to keep things in order).

Basically you want to take a basic template like Classic, and strip it out to make it look the way you want.

The basic structure of your theme will be something like:

Header.php {
Head, title, meta etc. – then the header HTML (wrapper, header, logo, navigation). Once you’ve opened the Divs for the main content area, it’s time to move on.
}

Index.php, page.php and single.php {
This will contain the internal content area structure: open the divs, insert The Loop, then close the divs. This template file calls Header.php before the content, then Sidebar.php and Footer.php after the content – tying everything together.
}

Sidebar.php {
This contains any information you want in the sidebar – simple as that. By the looks of your design, you won’t be needing this, so you can remove the call to the sidebar from the pages above.
}

Footer.php {
Simply closes everything.
}

Remember to keep the basic structure of things in place, and ensure your CSS keeps everything in line. Use style.css for this, and be sure to change the name of the theme in the commented area at the top.

Again, I hope this helps – if any of these terms don’t make sense, simply search for them at the top of this page.

To get things rolling, start by building a basic HTML site locally, then you can move the chunks over to WordPress when everything is running smoothly.

Hi Onlynina,

Please take a minute to look through the WordPress documentation – I’d advise starting from the beginning:

Where to start.

Basically anything you want to do will be somewhere in the docs – that’s what makes developing with WP so great!

Hope this helped.