Primary Color - Advertising Design

There are plenty of free WordPress themes out there, but what if you want the design of your new blog to match your existing site?

I was in the middle of redesigning the Primary Color HTML/CSS-based website when I decided to add a blog page. I’ve put together plenty of websites and implemented a few WordPress blog sites. How hard could it be, right? As it turns out there was a bit of a learning curve, so I’ve put together some tips and links that may be helpful to those interested in trying it themselves.

First place to start is with WordPress. There are other blog sources–Movable Type, WordPress and Textpattern–but the guys at WordPress are hard to beat on price (free) and support. Not to mention the fact that there are lots of free WordPress themes that you can tear apart to see how they work.

To get started, install the blog software in a folder on your site and have your navigation “Blog” link to the “index.php” file. You can use the default WordPress theme for starters to make sure everything functions properly. Now, you have a website with an integrated blog page. But the blog page looks nothing like your other web pages. Now the fun starts.

WordPress takes the main parts–the top (header), the middle (content) and the bottom (footer)–and combines them using HTML, CSS and PHP into a single blog page. There is a real good, basic tutorial at Jestro.com on the nuts and bolts of how to dismantle an HTML/CSS website and reconstruct it into your very own Wordpress theme. It describes the key steps you should follow to produce your basic theme pages of index, header, footer and stylesheet. There are more pages to a WordPress theme, but with these basic building blocks you can get up and running and let WP generate the other pages from generic templates.

Some of the other pages that you will want to style to fit your site are the “archives.php” and “single.php” files. Digging around in other WordPress themes can help you figure out the structure and content you’ll need for these. As always WordPress is the best source for info, Stepping into Templates is basically the official manual on creating WP themes and templates and check out the Design and Layout section also.

To build the pages for a blog all you really need is a text editor to create the text files, Wordpad will do, and an FTP program to upload them to the web, I use Filezilla. I used Dreamweaver though, because I’m comfortable with it and I don’t like editing live online. If you prefer this approach though, the Firefox Web Developer Extension is handy.

If you check out the above resources and you have some prior knowledge of CSS and PHP, converting a static website design won’t be too difficult. Time-consuming maybe, but not difficult.

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