How Much Variety Can Wordpress Offer?

[H.O.D 0]

Wordpress has steadily become a very good personal blogging platform and even larger websites are beginning to make use of the Wordpress platform to develop their portals. The best example is Techcrunch. Unless you go deep into Techcrunch, you can't really tell that it is Wordpress site! But of course, such a feat is not possible by all Wordpress sites. In most cases, one can immediately guess whether a site is using Wordpress or not.No matter how fancy the theme is or how many sliders or plugins it has, it is very easy to recognize a Wordpress site. This is where Wordpress starts to get a little boring. There are a number of talented theme designers out there and there are entire companies out there concentrating on developing Wordpress themes. Yet, take a look through their portfolios and you will notice that most of the themes have a common framework, and after sometime you just notice that all of them seem to be one and the same, with just a few tweaks here and there.My doubt is, is it difficult to produce themes like the one built by Techcrunch? I know that each theme, no matter how simple it might seem, takes a lot of time to build, and hence more complex themes will take a really long time to build, but is it possible or not to build themes that are totally different from each other, and will not appear to be a fixed framework each time? If it is possible, then what does it take to build such themes - knowledge or creativity??

[mahesh2k 0]

Developing themes for wordpress is extremely easy. You can first of all design 2 or three column HTML OR XHTML Template. once you do that just strip out the part of that file into individual php files for the theme. Then add the respective wordpress php calls to it. Once you follow this, just update the css file respectively and then you can upload the theme. It may look difficult while reading this but if you do this on your own once you'll feel like wordpress theme designer. It's so easy and exciting to build themes using wordpress that i often create random themes with design and play with it. There is one tutorial i found on the web which was written by knowledgesitra member web_designer on her blog. She wrote series of tutorials for converting HTML file into wodpress theme. I'm sure you'll find it useful. Take a look at wordpress tutorial and see if its easy or not. For me that tutorial is heavenly sent. It's so good, only thing is that you just haev to adopt some more calls that are required in new wordpress themes. That is all. Read that tutorial and then come back here to give feedback. i'm sure you'll enjoy that tutorial and will find it easy to create themes. Forget about frameworks and CSS stuff for now. Oh and to answer your question, it is possible to build such themes it just requires more manipulation of CSS.

[manuleka 0]

Wordpress has steadily become a very good personal blogging platform and even larger websites are beginning to make use of the Wordpress platform to develop their portals. The best example is Techcrunch. Unless you go deep into Techcrunch, you can't really tell that it is Wordpress site! But of course, such a feat is not possible by all Wordpress sites. In most cases, one can immediately guess whether a site is using Wordpress or not.
No matter how fancy the theme is or how many sliders or plugins it has, it is very easy to recognize a Wordpress site. This is where Wordpress starts to get a little boring. There are a number of talented theme designers out there and there are entire companies out there concentrating on developing Wordpress themes. Yet, take a look through their portfolios and you will notice that most of the themes have a common framework, and after sometime you just notice that all of them seem to be one and the same, with just a few tweaks here and there.

My doubt is, is it difficult to produce themes like the one built by Techcrunch? I know that each theme, no matter how simple it might seem, takes a lot of time to build, and hence more complex themes will take a really long time to build, but is it possible or not to build themes that are totally different from each other, and will not appear to be a fixed framework each time? If it is possible, then what does it take to build such themes - knowledge or creativity??

i agree... i've done a bit of research just to see some of the wordpress themes done and advertised by a lot of designers for the platform and as mentioned above, they seem to be very similar from a designers perspective

they all seem to sit with the same layout framework... i think most of these designers don't actually make much out of selling their themes so they create simple ones (very quick) ...

i guess if one really put out a decent amount for a theme, i'm sure some of those designers can actually come up with something spectacular and unique

check this coolest wordpress themes for 2011
http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

they do look similar
Edited November 25, 2011 by manuleka (see edit history)