Making progress

I’ve been working away on my new theme, and I’m almost at a point where the basic style and layout is complete, then I’ll be going onto more advanced areas like custom page templates and Jetpack specific features. Here’s a screenshot of how things are looking now:

One of the areas I’ve struggled with a little bit in creating an accessible theme is creating an attractive colour scheme while providing enough contrast, and you may notice the colours have changed a little since my last preview. Ultimately I feel I’ve made good progress and this will, I hope, make me a better themer. On a related note look out for a larger article I’m working on that will go into depth about creating an accessible WordPress menu system.

Starting to code

When I was first started out in WordPress I learnt a great deal by following the Themeshaper WordPress Theme Tutorial to build a theme from scratch. This was very valuable, but these days when I’m building something in WordPress I always use the _s starter theme which is build along similar lines and is constantly bring updated. Anyway, I’ve downloaded a copy of _s and have begun to build my new theme over on Github. I’ve started by customizing style.css, without every last detail, then I’ll customize the functionality, before coming back to refine the styles.

Building a WordPress Theme

Today I’m starting to build a brand new WordPress theme named after my wife Daniela. Designed for companies and individuals in need of a simple on-line presence. I’ve been working in Macaw and Typecast and here’s a preview of what I’m aiming to achieve:

I’m aiming to support all the main Jetpack features, including the portfolio and testimonial custom post types, featured posts and more. Most importantly I’m also aiming to support all the requirements of the accessibility-ready tag. I’ll post more as work continues.