I have now finally finished designing my own theme from scratch for the first time – the other themes where “ports” (heavily modified) of other peoples work. The rounded series Dark/Light came about because I was trying to take park in CSS reboot or at least that was the plan. Unfortunately I didn’t complete my theme till 3 days later. As far as I can remember its taken me about a month to be happy with the theme. I could off released it a lot earlier but it wasn’t “right”.

Plugins
The only plugin that’s crucial to the theme is The Excerpt Reloaded - which I am using to automatically cut down the post size once its not the first post anymore. I use

<

< ?php the_excerpt_reloaded(100,' < P > <b > <i> <u> <em> <strong> <blockquote> <img /> <a > <ol> <ul> <li>’,FALSE); ?>

So that’s cut posts off at 100 words and allow those codes in a post. I cant remember what the False s for.

The Excerpt Reloaded . By Kaf Oseo.

I am also using the widget plug-in for sidebar management across all my themes -

Sidebar Widgets By Automattic, Inc

Design –
If you take a look at my themes site you should see where I have come from in the past couple of months – Violet theme which hasn’t got any rounded corners but dose have a right and side nave bar. Rounded which is a blue theme. I haven’t got the others uploaded to my theme site yet but I will have.

I set out on making a theme from scratch after seeing vidar’s site after a redesign. I liked the colours he was using and set out to make something like that – in the end I ended up with something completely different but still cool , least I think so and that’s what matters.

Things I have learnt.

As this was the first time I have actually made a theme from scratch and actually finished it without giving up, the main thing I learnt is that if you have a problem and have used up all your resources (ie google) don’t hesitate to ask people. The guys and girls on irc.freenode.net channels #wordpress and #css have helped me out when I have got stuck – #css mainly when I was having border problems (reisio) and #wordpress when I couldn’t get the php loop working properly (undersigned)

If you have got a blog and want a theme different from all of the rest don’t hesitate to make a theme yourself – maybe someone else will like it.