When thinking about what would make for a good first post on my site, I decided that it might be a good idea to mention some of the tools that I have used to put it all together to this point. I am by no means an expert when it comes to any of this stuff but, a lot of the information that I’ve listed here may be helpful to some readers/visitors/passerby’s.

Building a WordPress Theme

Chris Spooner’s tutorial “How to Build a Custom WordPress Theme from Scratch” is a great place to start for anybody that wants to build there own custom WordPres theme. No previous WordPress experience required. The tutorial outlines all of the important files that need to updated in order for your custom theme to work properly.

His tutorials are easy to follow with easy to understand instructions and great use of imagery. A site that every developer should bookmark.

Building a WordPress Template

Templates are different from Themes in WordPress. You may find that you do not want to use the default theme on a page. You don’t want to link a bunch of unnecessary external javascript or css stylesheets in every page of your site if they are not required. That will really hurt your page speed score.

WordPress Max has posted a great  tutorial titled “How to Create a WordPress Page Template“. Implementing a custom template is as simple as uploading the php file to your site via ftp and choosing the template from the dropdown menu within your WordPress admin panel.

Setting up MAMP for Local Development

CSS-Tricks has posted a couple of great video tutorials for setting up MAMP. “First Moments with MAMP“ is the perfect place to start. Everyone knows the value of working with your site locally but, if you want to work with a CMS like WordPress locally you will need to install MAMP for Mac or XAMPP for Windows. If working in Windows Six Revisions offers a great tutorial titled “Using XAMPP for Local WordPress Theme Development“ that not only gets you started with XAMPP but also shows you how to install WordPress within the XAMPP environment.

CSS & jQuery

I love tools that make my life easier. Border Radius is a handy like tool that allows you to enter the radius for each corner of your box and then spits out the proper CSS for Webkit, Gecko and CSS3.

For my Portfolio page I used a handy little tutorial over at Net Tuts titled “Create a Slick Tabbed Content Area using CSS & jQuery“. I love this technique and have used it a few other times on other sites that I’ve worked on. It’s easy to implement and very light in code. I’ve actually implemented this without using any jQuery just to keep it as light and simple as possible.

The next plugin that I used on the Portfolio page was jQuery Lightbox. I simple to implement plug in that works very well in any picture or image gallery. Highly recommended.

WordPress Plugins

Since getting this site up and running I’ve been concerned about it’s performance. At times it seems painfully slow. I’m unsure if this is because of my host or WordPress. Pagespeed it going to be something that I’ll be adress as I add more to the site. I’ve implemented many pagespeed techniques on other sites that I have worked with but never with a cms like WordPress.

One of the first plugins that I found to address this issue was WP Super Cache. This plug in creates a static copy of each page of your site and presents this to almost all of your visitors. It reduces calls to the database in turn reducing load on your server. It’s great for your visitors but can be annoying if your developing directly on your web server.

Ok, I think that about covers it. Thanks for reading.