Theme Tip 13 – Common pitfalls with theme design to avoid

Making WordPress themes is a bit like playing the piano – easy to play, but hard to master. Sure anyone can bang out chopsticks after a few minutes sitting in front of that nice little casio keyboard you got as a unwanted gift for your 12th birthday but have you ever tried learning some Chopin?

All too often many free themes are a rehash of some previous theme and/or don’t demonstrate a lot of creativity. If you’re in the process of making your first WordPress theme, don’t let my harsh words put you off. Certainly one of the attractions of WordPress theme design is the low barriers to making them in the first place. But here’s a few tips on how to avoid the common mistakes people make then building WordPress themes. If you’ve got intentions of releasing your work to the community or even becoming a premium theme seller then these are especially important.

1. Keep it simple – Please, please, please – do NOT over complicate your theme. If you can’t work your way around your theme after a couple of days coding it how do you think the rest of us are going to get on? Keep your markup and css simple.
2. No support for Widgets – Ok, most people know what widgets are and how important they are so it’s rare you’ll find a theme now that doesn’t support widgets. If you don’t know what widgets are it’s time to go find out – they’re important. Try to keep your support for widgets as flexible and as logical as possible.
3. Complicated theme options pages – Do NOT spend days and days coding what you think will be the best theme options page the world has ever seen. No matter how brilliant it is, chances are the more ‘advanced’ it is, the more you are breaking point 1.
4. No support for modern WordPress functions – If you’re learning theme development from another WordPress theme make sure you’re building in support for newer WordPress functions introduced in 2.9.2 and 3.0 on like native WordPress post thumbnails or the new menu system introduced in 3.0.
5. Poor documentation and no code commenting – Ok this one might be a right pain in the ass to do, but trust me it’s an even bigger pain in the ass when you don’t tell your potential theme users about the super spiffy custom jquery you’ve coded up to transform all post titles into klingon in Chrome. Trust me, spend some time to give your theme users that little bit of documentation and everyone’s life will be that little bit easier.

Ok that’s all for today!