While there are many free WordPress themes from which to choose for your own blog, you may not find one that exactly suits your needs. If that describes you, then learning how to design your own theme may be what you are looking for.

Tessa Blakeley Silver wrote an instructional manual named WordPress Theme Design. It is intended to be a complete guide to creating professional WordPress themes, with practical step-by-step instructions for theme design.

Included are development tools for setting up your WordPress sandbox, design tips and suggestions, setting up the template structure for your theme, coding markup, tips on testing, debugging and taking it live, reviewing the best practices.

Shriharsha Bhat of Packt Publishing said, “This book walks through clear, step-by-step instructions to build a custom theme for the WordPress open-source blog engine. The author provides design tips and suggestions and covers setting up the WordPress sandbox, and reviews the best practices from setting up the theme’s template structure, through coding markup, testing, and debugging, to taking it live.”

“The last three chapters cover additional tips, tricks, and various cookbook recipes for adding popular site enhancements to WordPress theme designs using 3rd-party plugins as well as creating API hooks to add custom plugins.”

Learn more about WordPress Theme Design by visiting Amazon.com.

_______
Jim Hutchinson
Website Managers, LLC
Discount WordPress Blog Hosting

For those who do things the hard way, such as hard coding HTML, PHP, CSS and other scripting, downloading WordPress plugins and installing them manually, there is a better way. One of the things I am very cautious about is entering my website login information into forms that transmit them to other sites.

That means in order to update WordPress plugins, the manual method is to visit your plugins page, look for those with updates available, click the link to the plugin site, click the download button there, unzip the plugin, move it to the WordPress folder, open FTP and upload the new files, go back into WordPress Admin panel, disable the plugin, refresh to make sure the new one was seen, then enable the plugin.

That is how I normally do it. After going through that process many times, it has become easy enough to finish an update within a few minutes. That was until I got bold enough to put my website login into the Automated Plugin Updates form and let the software do all the tedious work.
????????
Using Firefox, the login information is saved, so all I have to do is select the SSL option, click the Proceed button and wait. For most of the plugins, the updating is painless. For others though, the connection is never made, so I can still satisfy my desire to “kick it old school”.

Plus with the SSL option, my login credentials are encrypted while passing through to the WordPress plugins site. The updates now take even less time so I can get back to researching and writing. Note that this function is in WordPress 2.5+. For those who have not upgraded yet, this is just one of the many options that you are missing out on.