Before you get started with creating your own WordPress theme, there are a few things that you’ll need.

1. A Pen
2. A Note Pad
3. WordPress, Apache, MySQL, and PHP installed on your local computer or access to a WordPress test install on your website

I personally have everything installed on my local computer because, in my opinion, it makes it so much easier to adjust/tweak code without having to wait for the software to update files for you online. But whatever works for you.

Ok. First things first.

Take your pen and notepad, and write down everything that you want your new website to do, the features it should have, and any special tweaks that you want to apply. Take your time and list everything you can think of regardless of whether or not it’ll actually work.

Here’s a partial list for WPMania:

1. Effective use of whitespace, not too much, not too little
2. Possibly a magazine type theme
3. Few graphics files, and they must be small, largest being logo up to 4k or so.
4. Locations for advertising, in prime areas, but not obtrusive
5. 2 widget sidebars
6. Feed icons in header
7. Pages on primary horizontal nav bar
8. Categories on secondary horizontal nav bar, parent only no child cats
9. JQuery for tabs, news, etc
10. Newsletter form
11. Use custom fields?
12. custom templates?
13. special functions?
14. Separate loop(s) for featured?

You’ll notice a few of these have question marks. I won’t really know what I want done until we get a little further into this, so I’ll leave them as questions for now. It’s not necessary to have everything perfect to get started. You just need a basic idea of what you want.

Next, take your pen and notepad again and draw out your new theme. Place boxes where you want everything to go: Posts, Sidebars, Advertising, Header, Footer, Content, any sizing requirements, you name it. Once again, it doesn’t have to be perfect, you just want to have an idea of what you’re going to create in front of you.

For me, this is one of the longer parts of creating a theme. I like to spend some time playing around with different ideas on paper before I start coding.

So take your time, make a list, draw some pictures, and get a good idea of what you want to accomplish. In the next post we’ll get started with the actual coding.

Until then…