Category Archives: Web

Designing Custom WordPress Theme Based on an Existing Website

 

When I decided to implement a blog for BZTech Solutions, I knew that it would be WordPress and I knew that i wanted to incorporate the blog as part of my website's look and feel. I did not know how hard or how easy it would be, however. As I wrote earlier, after I installed WordPress and set it up after viewing the Lynda.com course on installing WordPress, I took a look at Theme Matcher as a potential answer to creating my own custom theme. Instead, I chose to take one of the default WordPress themes, Twenty Twelve, and customize it based on the CSS styling and HTML structure of my website.

I began by replacing the header and footer with my own header and footer. Then I bulk imported chunks of my own CSS and put it in the style.css file. Some things worked and many more did not. I made heavy use of Firebug and Firefox to determine where style were being overridden and implemented adjustments. Finally, I took the correct approach and viewed a course on Lynda.com for creating custom WordPress themes and then deconstructed the Twenty Twelve theme and correctly modified it to create the bztechtheme. Through this process, I gained a better understanding of how the various php files in the theme worked.

I am satisfied with my new bztechtheme, but I doubt that I am finished with tweaking the theme to meet my expectations. The whole process has been enjoyable and highly educational and I recommend it to anyone who seeks to create a custom theme based on their current website design.

 

URLs vs. URIs

Very helpful post by Daniel Miessler on URI vs. URL terminology.

Well, because we often use URIs in forms that don’t technically qualify as a URL. For example, you might be told that a file you need is located at files.hp.com. That’s a URI, not a URL—and that system might very well respond to many protocols over many ports.

If you go to http://files.hp.com you could conceivably get completely different content than if you go to ftp://files.hp.com. And this type of thing is only getting more common. Think of all the different services that live on the various Google domains.

 

So, if you use URI you’ll always be technically correct, and if you use URL you might not be. Finally, there is significant chatter around the term “URL” being—or becoming—deprecated. So URI is a fairly safe choice in terms of accuracy.

URLs vs. URIs.