Tips For Designing WordPress Sites For The First Time

WordPress is a very popular web designing platform that is used by millions of designers and developers all around the world. One its greatest benefits is that major search engines love WordPress sites for their SEO-friendliness, and the code behind it is very clean and simple. If you are going to design a WordPress site for the first time, you should read this post first.

Read Widely and Understand the Intricacies of WordPress

It is vital that you stay on top of WordPress as it is ever changing (their frequent updates are serious business!). A good way to start mastering the platform is to do a lot of reading. Not just some, but lots and lots of reading. That being said, there’s even more to follow if you are considering using ready-made themes and adding plugins. While you can’t simply read everything at a go, the least you should do is to follow major changes.

If you are like browsing WordPress sites and you are actually going to use this platform to design your own website, you must already be an avid reader yourself. A good place to start fueling your reading tank is to check out WordPress blogs and forums. These are fantastic places to exchange ideas with other WordPress designers, read questions posed by other designers (so you don’t make the mistake of creating “repeated” threads – moderators hate that!) and just see what other ordinary users are posting.

Observe and Find Out What Makes Existing Themes Click

Another great way to improve your WordPress web design skills is to examine and pick out the best elements from existing themes. When you select themes for viewing, ensure that you choose good themes. It is counterproductive to learn from bad designs. When it comes to theme preferences, it becomes a rather subjective matter. However, you should just head to WordPress Theme Directory, download a few popular themes, install them and start testing. If you are pleased with the feel and look of a particular theme, then you know you got a winner and you can dissect it further to learn more about it.

Master WordPress-Specific CSS

If you come from web design, then you should already know some CSS. The good news is that most of this knowledge is reusable. In other words, the CSS you know from static sites is the same you’ll use with WordPress. Before you embark on the journey of creating awesome WordPress websites, you will need to turn your attention to find out about WordPress generated classes too. In addition, there is quite a lot of theme-specific CSS to discover.

If CSS is not your forte, you can still use drag-and-drop frameworks – though it’s not recommended for professional designers. When you want to create real designs, you should stick to good old manual CSS coding.

Learn a Little about PHP Code

Before you begin designing WordPress sites, you will need to learn how to handle simple PHP code. Once you are past that stage, you can proceed to familiarize yourself the structure of WordPress themes and the way they function in general.

While these tips for designing your first WordPress site won’t make you a guru, it’s a good starting point. You may also face some challenges when designing with WordPress so you should decide if you have the time and knowledge to handle it yourself. Just like many things in life, if you force yourself into doing it, you will only stand to gain a lot of pain. Why not trust the task of designing WordPress sites to a proficient web design company in New Jersey?