The WordPress theme market is a huge opportunity for designers and developers, especially since sites like ThemeForest have made it so easy to produce premium themes and make money from them. If you do it right, you can easily make a substantial income solely from WordPress theme design.
Of course, in order to do it right you have to know the tools and tricks that enable professionals to create work that is worthy of that title. Let’s check out some of the most vital, helpful and game-changing hacks, tools and frameworks to help you achieve that professionalism in your themes.
Being Prepared – 199 High-Quality Resources
20 WordPress Theme Frameworks and Starting Resources
Using the right tools can obviously make a huge difference, and this roundup of frameworks and resources is a good place to check out the options and get well informed before making a decision.
63 Essential WordPress Hacks, Tutorials, Help Files and Cheat Sheets
SpeckyBoy compiled this solid collection of WordPress resources, and it’s a good place to start becoming familiar with WordPress customization.
100+ Resources for WordPress Theme Developers
From DesignM.ag, this post presents an enormous and yet relevant array of theme resources – definitely enough to keep any WordPress lover busy for a long time!
Knowing How to Do it Right – 135+ Amazing Tips, Tutorials & Hacks
13 Useful Code Snippets for WordPress Theme Developers
A truly useful collection of hacks/code snippets from WDL. Fun stuff like customizing your login page, detecting mobile devices and more. These are all fun tricks that I think every theme developer will use from time to time.
20+ Useful WordPress Recipes
WPRecipes is a well known and useful source for fun WordPress hacks, and in this fun post by Nick La you’ll learn 20 very useful recipes allowing you to add social buttons, register custom shortcodes, interact with the Twitter and Feedburner APIs, and a whole bunch more.
30 Most Wanted WordPress Comment Hacks
Looking to become a comment-hack expert? This excellent post on InstantShift is an great place to start. You’ll learn everything from neat styling tricks to getting the total comment count for your blog to separating trackbacks from comments and more.
40 Awesome Tutorials and Techniques for WordPress Theme Developers
This article was published by Tripwire Magazine, and is another great collection of how-to resources for theme building. My favorite part about this article is how well organized it is (sorted into different sections like ‘Comments’, ‘Feed Hacks’, etc.), making it easy to find what you’re looking for.
Advanced Power Tips for WordPress Theme Developers
In this post you’ll learn several impressive advanced techniques for developing robust, exceptional themes. Once you’ve mastered many of the basic hacks and customizations, this an excellent read.
Excellent Tips for Speeding Up WordPress Theme Development
This article touches on a topic that we all can appreciate – maximizing your efficiency when developing themes and making the most of your time. Some interesting thoughts here!
Creating a Quality WordPress Theme
And one more excellent article – this one from Noupe, with 12 essential thoughts on infusing quality into your WordPress theme. After all, if it’s not the best you can make it then what’ s the point?
Using the Right Tool for the Job — 4 Awesome Frameworks
WordPress Starter Theme Project
This basic theme framework (developed by Dan Philibin of WPCandy) is definitely an excellent choice – although I’ve never used it to develop a theme before, I have sifted through the code and I can definitely say it’s very clean and well organized. If you’re looking for a clean, straightforward blank theme to jump start your development, this what I’d recommend.
Thematic
Thematic is a very versatile and famous WordPress framework, exceptional for a huge variety of uses. If you’re going to be doing heavy WordPress theme development, I highly recommend becoming familiar with a heavy-duty, powerful framework like Thematic.
Thisn’t a coded framework – it’s actually a set of Photoshop layers and elements that’s just perfect for rapidly generating theme mockups. If you’ll be creating lots of theme mockups, this worth looking at – it could save you a lot of time.
That’s All, Folks
There is definitely a huge amount of prime resources out there for the WordPress theme developer – and a lot of opportunity, too. By working a little at a time and learning something new every day, we can all improve our skills and have a lot of fun with WordPress theme development.
I’d encourage you to give it a try if you haven’t done so before, and as always please share your opinion and let me know if I’ve left something out!
