hooknose

Sorry for reopening this topic, but I must add a word of caution. Assuming the theme you’re using isn’t the default theme provided with the WordPress installation, upgrading WordPress, whether automatically or manually, might render parts of the theme unusable if the theme isn’t compatible with the new WordPress version (which is true for any CMS). Same goes for the plugins. For instance, if a certain template tag or function in the theme (or plugin) is deprecated in the new WP version and replaced with another, then the part of the theme using this function or plugin will not work. Therefor, if I were you, I’d strongly discourage my clients from upgrading by themselves and even disable this option from being displayed in the admin panel. New WP installations do try to take care of compatibility issues, but I would trust that just to a certain point – I wouldn’t expect, say, WordPress 5 to treat incompatibilities issues down to WordPress 3.

Note that you don’t need to upgrade WP for the blog or website to continue functioning properly, so even if there is an upgrade available every month you don’t need to upgrade every month. In fact, the website will continue working the same way it did so far even if you never upgrade. Of course it’s recommended to upgrade when there’s a security update, but other than that you can upgrade only when there’s a major release or when minor updates have accumulated to a certain degree. So you might need to upgrade once or twice a year. Then you should check beforehand if each of the plugins works with the new version (often there’s an upgrade for the plugin you should download separately), and if there are any changes you should make to the theme so it would work properly with the new WP version. You should also make a copy of the old WP version before upgrading, just in case you missed something and need to revert to the old version. And this is true for any CMS – upgrades should not be done by the clients unless they know exactly what they’re doing.

Otherwise, if you let your clients upgrade by themselves, then at some point or another – and this is bound to happen, whether next month or two years from now – you will get hysterical phone calls right in the middle of the first night of that perfect romantic holiday you’ve been planning for and saving for for months, desperately crying about the website falling apart. And then, after canceling your vacation without a refund, getting screamed at by the missis or hubby and finally dumped, and after spending hours to find what could possibly go wrong and pulling half your hair out, while your clients is losing visitors by the minute, you’ll find out it’s only a minor change in one function that requires changing two lines in one of the plugins. A mess that could have been avoided if upgrading was done by someone who knows what he or she is doing.

I’m glad to see that WordPress is moving a way from blog-only and more and more sites look “normal”, as in magazine-style, or just page-based, without the “blog” or “news”.

I think that when you need just a simple website with “static” pages and some kind of news/blog/articles section for just a few authors then you don’t need all the complexity of systems like Joomla, then WordPress provides an excellent solution that is simpler to set up and learn how to use.

Found the answer.

There’s a difference between a regular or static website layout and a WP theme where you have to integrate WP PHP functions into the design. As Technokinetics said, there are different stages – there’s the visual layout and there’s the functional PHP.

For the visual design or non-WP websites (I only did one WP theme so far) I usually start from the HTML + CSS using an HTML editor (there are many good free ones I used over the years – NotePad++, Arachnophilia, HTMLKit and now I’m going to give Nvu a try). If the graphics are more complex or need more experimenting I start with Photoshop. It depends on the type of website – if the emphasis is on usability, like an informational website, I start with the code, if the emphasis is on look I may start with the graphics.

If I start from the code my first step is to decide what basic layout or structure best fits the specific requirements of the website – the header, footer, vertical or horizontal bars, if I need boxes and tables, going to use fixed width or make it flexible (if you use fixed width better make it suitable also for 800×600 resolution since some people still use it), what colors best suit my purpose. I create the basic layout and then work on the details.

If I start from the graphics it’s usually because I have some graphical elements in mind that I’m not sure what I’m going to do with or because it’s a complex graphical design. So I open Photoshop, create a 1024×800 blank image (800 or more because I want to see what it looks like when I scroll) and start moving my graphical elements around till I get a layout I’m happy with, save the parts that need to be saved as images and recreate the rest with HTML.

For the one WP theme I did so far, first I created the visual layout and then moved the CSS plus some HTML into a WP sandbox theme (Ultimate Diva Sandbox, but the sandbox theme you can find here in the Themes section might be a better choice if you’re designing for WP 2.7, except you have to place a visible link to the authors in the footer). With a sandbox you mostly have to edit just the CSS, at worst just make some minimal edits in the PHP.

Now I’m trying to work on a website that will use WP more as a CMS and I need a theme with custom functionality, so I can’t use a sandbox. As I’m hoping to use it for more than one website I decided to create a sandbox for myself, that is a theme that will have all the functionality I need with the most minimal design possible, so later on I can integrate the same PHP with different designs. I think it’s a good thing to do also for regular WP themes, but then you have to dive into the documentation here and look into functioning 2.7 themes to see how everything works, which I don’t recommend for your first theme.

If you’re going to design a WP theme from scratch some HTML tags might be more usable than others. For the sidebar it’s better to use unordered list (ul and li’s) than div’s because that’s WP default.

The software Steveorevo mentioned look interesting, maybe I’ll try them. Thanks ??