We’ve already chosen Thesis – because we’ve had our eye on it for a while.  This may also be the case with you – you may have spotted a theme that you quite like – or that you’d like to try with your next blog.
If not, you may find that you either have an idea of a theme layout, type or other concept.  Searching for examples of themes might give you inspiration, or you may find looking at featured blogs within your own niche helps.

If all else fails, you can google for themes, using a keyword such as ‘functional’, ‘beautiful’ or more to narrow down your concept.

An important aspect of designing for WordPress is ensuring you are satisfied with your theme choice.  We advise clients to ‘ignore’ colours – those in most cases can be changed, but look at the underlying structure and graphics.

Once you’ve chosen your theme, you should generate a colour scheme.  This process shouldn’t be rushed, but at the same time should take no longer than a couple of hours – start with the key colour you like, and generate options, at sites like Colour Scheme designer.  I like this one because it generates a basic, solid theme, simply by picking the colour you want – and can go into more depth, simply by choosing a different dial along the top of the main selector, changing the angle, contrast and more within the site.  And it exports the results to html, photoshop, gimp, which is an amazing, extra tool that makes a lot of difference.  You can import swatches by following the information provided with your program.

Remember to save your final colour scheme URL provided once it’s all generated – that URL will store your choices without needing to duplicate anything.

Our next post will talk about building the basics of your theme around your content – whether this is a redesign of an existing blog, or to start out.

The WordPress Wonderwoman is an older project that was originally a sales site for design and portfolio work with WordPress, blog coaching (which has split to here) and consultation/emergency support.

In association with TheBloggingCoach and HostingForwriters, the WPwonderwoman is going to be a portfolio, in depth tech information and discussion on themes, plugins, and more, plus a portfolio display area.
WordPressWonderwoman will also be the tech support contact for all of my blogging offerings.

So, in the next few days and weeks, I’ll share the design process, and the order I completed the work in, so you can work through it.  And at the end, I’ll offer a cheatsheet and it will become the foundation for our work in designing blogs.

First choice we’ve made, which is where the design process starts, is our theme. I’ve been working with clients that enjoy Thesis, an amazingly optimised, solid theme that allows you to customise everything in broad strokes, or down to tiny ‘minor’ things.  More importantly, it keeps your customisations seperate, allowing you to upgrade the components running the blog without losing your customisations.

Blogexpertise is the aweber list for this site, but also features a once monthly ‘uber’ newsletter.  Every three months, we’ll offer the best of the blog and that newsletter in download format, so no matter what you wnat, you’ll be able to find the information you need.

Backing up your WordPress blog

Once you’ve designed your theme, you should download it and save it – downloading the whole of your wp-content folder periodically will also retain your plugins and any uploads you’ve made between backups.  I recommend using an FTP program and downloading the whole folder at least once a month.

That takes care of the core of your blog, but not your posts, so to do that I recommend that you use the ‘wordpress backup‘ plugin.  It’s simple enough that you can ’set and forget’ it – as long as you’re sure to check it occassionally.

You can check out more high and lo-tech ways to do so at the WordPress Codex.

How do we backup?

As you’ve probably seen from our first post, we didn’t actually keep backups, but on my other blogs, I use a combination of the WordPress Backup plugin and every month of content I add, I export the contents of my blog as XML.  I also download a backup of my sites every month, and run a backup system on the new server.

And you?

I’d love to hear how you backup your blog and what you’ve had success with – and what hasn’t worked.

In early April of 2009, the server I was on suffered a catastrophic failure and we lost a lot of our sites, plus the backup drive, which was a redundant drive on the system.  Unfortunately, I’d relied on the backup drive far too much, and didn’t work on keeping backups of these blogs, so the old ‘Blogging Coach’ was mostly lost.

The new Blogging Coach is an amalgim of The WordPress Wonderwoman site, articles about blogging that I’ve written over the years, the articles we’ve retrieved from the snapshots of the old Blogging Coach site, and The Writing Blogger.

Enjoy!