If you’re confident with your CSS and HTML, it’s not hard at all to step up to the challenge of building a custom Wordpress theme. This overview shows the process of how my latest custom Wordpress theme was built from design concept through to completed theme. See how the static design is split up into the various Wordpress theme files, and discover how the simple PHP snippets can add that dynamic functionality of a blog. The design concept The theme I’m working on is named Sticky. The main feature of the design is its sticky sidebar (hence the name Sticky!), which stays in place while the main content scrolls past it. There’s also a few fancy effects such as the shadows and inset text appearance that I’ll be building with the help of CSS3. With the post focusing on the production of the theme, I won’t go into too many details on how the design was built, but you can see from the Photoshop previews that it uses a 16 column grid with 24px baseline; a fairly muted colour palette of a beige and grey, with a dark red as a highlighting colour for links; typography is set to serif font throughout for that touch of class!; and the whole design uses very subtle textures to give a more realistic and tactile feel. Anatomy of a Wordpress theme Before getting stuck into the build process, it’s important to know how Wordpress themes work. If you’ve looked at any prebuilt theme, you’ll notice that it’s all contained in a folder, and there’s around 12 core files. Some themes, including the Default Wordpress theme, include more files which allow extra customisation, but aren’t mandatory additions

Whatever the business communication you are working on, even if it is not something for business use, the art of getting your message across is to concentrate on putting into words and images what is in your head.  This is what writing is really about; conveying your thoughts into a message which will be understood in someone else’s head and as a print design tip, it is one of the most powerful.

In part one we covered why books are still the main form of dissemination of information – more so than the internet, TV or radio and any other form of printed media.  Books have credibility and in-built authority which can be tapped into by producing booklets – a cut-down version of a book which contains nuggets of information and allows you to mix your sales message into the content.