Duh….

  • I’m new to WP, have been going through the codex–in circles.

    I have a site (with multiple blogs) laid out in my mind, and have a dummy of the home page in a pdf file made from a page layout program.

    Translating this into WordPress (the first time) looks incredibly complicated and time consuming. (I guess I’M the dummy.)

    For starters, I don’t see any themes that look like the home page layout I want. I mean I’ve got a banner graphic with a line of text above and below it, and then 3 columns of unequal width: Left is relatively unchanging, with each subhead having a couple of sentences that continue on separate pages (blogs or comment pages) linked by a “read more” (from the left column paragraphs on the home page); Middle column is the main blog (except for some permanent items in boxes which remain in place as the blog moves down with each new post. Right column is misc and ads. I’ve got a color plan chosen.

    Actually it doesn’t feel as though the codex is taking me in circles. It’s more like a labyrinth.

    How do I begin?

    And then what?

    Thanks.

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  • Hi,

    I’d say you begin by hiring a competent webdesigner.

    Don’t worry about the wordpress part of it at the moment. You have to translate into HTML what you have in your pdf. That’s somehting that comes easy with experience, but even then, some designs can be quite tricky.

    Once you have one html file, you can start analysing how to break it into the different theme pages. I believe there are 4 “main” theme parts:

    1-header.php
    2-footer.php
    3-index.php
    4-sidebar.php

    So that gives you a bit of an idea of where your different parts of the one html page go. You probably could get away with doing just 1 page, index.php for your theme, but that would lose you a lot of future flexibility.

    Once you have the HTML and an idea of how to break it down into the different theme’s parts, you can start worrying about what bit of WP specific code to put throughout. To do that, the best is to look at how other people have done their templates.

    It’s an adventure! Good luck, have fun, save often, don’t forget to eat, sleep, go to the loo or be nice to your loved ones ??

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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