• Home
  • About Mitch
  • Speaking
  • Articles
  • Contact
  • Home
  • About Mitch
  • Speaking
  • Articles
  • Contact

Digital Strategist

WordPress Developer

Content Creator

Unapologetic Punk

Mitch Canter

  • X
  • Bluesky
  • GitHub
  • Twitch
  • YouTube
  • LinkedIn
Tutorial

Creating a WordPress Theme from a .PSD File – Part 1 (Background)

CMDR Mitchcraft

Reading time: 2 minutes

A lot of people ask me what process I use to design themes for WordPress, and my answer to that question is the same answer I give to people who ask my design process “in general”: I start with a Photoshop mockup and take it into HTML via Dreamweaver.  The only difference is that I (quite literally) drop WordPress code in at the last minute, and separate a SINGLE .html file into .php files (header.php, sidebar.php, footer.php, and index.php).

So, to shed some insight into my process (and the process of creating a WordPress theme in general), I’m going to let you in on the creation of a theme for one of my current clients, Pray With Africa:

Pray With Africa is sending out a missions team to different cities in Africa in the next few weeks.  They wanted a site that could be easily updated, have a blog element, and could be a place for pictures to be funneled in.

Of course, I chose WordPress (and not just because of my affinity for it).  It’s super easy to blog with, has the ability to bring in Flickr galleries, and can be combined with Windows Live Writer to do posts offline while they are in the remote areas.  Live Writer can then push the posts out all at once when they have access again.

So I set to work on a design.  Here’s what I came up with:

Pretty straightforward, nothing too fancy, and just the right amount of grunge and clean to make it interesting. 

So, that’s where I am right now.  I’ll be documenting my progress as I turn this wireframe mockup into a WordPress theme.  The next part will be the different parts to a theme and where those parts lie in the comp pictured above.

[Note: this project is due tomorrow for the client, so don’t expect it to be documented right away.  Client first, then education 🙂 ]

WordPress Theme
  • Using Hyperlinks Correctly in WordPress

    Using Hyperlinks Correctly in WordPress

    Reading time: 2 minutes

    Any good content marketer worth his or her salt knows the value of using links in their content. It’s a good strategy to practice – whether you’re linking internally to content you’ve written in the past or to external resources you mention in posts.  However, a lot of people overlook a small, single detail that could…

    WordPress
  • Hangin’ with the ITIVE Crew

    Hangin’ with the ITIVE Crew

    Reading time: 1 minute

    You can see it in action on the Social Media Clubhouse website – the various events have various images, logos, and link categories showing up depending on where you are on the site. You can download the plugin from the official WordPress repository, or install it through your local blog! EDIT: Screencast below 🙂

    WordPress