A designer can help walk you through style decisions, but the more you know about layout options and the more input you have about style, the better your design experience will be. With this in mind, the following briefly outlines the basics of layout and finding a style.

Main Content Area

Since most of this is handled as the content you enter when you write a post or page, there isn’t too much to discuss with your designer about this (post elements are covered above). The content area can handle insertion of images, music or downloadable files.. all using the built-in file upload buttons. You can also insert HTML code or javascript to insert external content.

General Header Area

The header area is what appears at the top of every page of your site. Typically a header includes the title of the site (or logo), a tabbed navigation area, and possibly an RSS link to your site’s feed, a search form or an email sign-up box. If you want to include items you can easily update in your header, you should request an additional widget-area.

Sidebars

How many sidebars do you want? Do you want your sidebar(s) on the left, right, or one on each side perhaps? Describe the number of sidebars and their positions. By default all themes we design come with widget-ready sidebars. Until widgets are placed via the wp-admin panel, default sidebar code will appear in the sidebar(s) of your theme (such as ‘recent articles’, list of categories, recent comments, etc).

Footer

The footer generally includes a copyright notice with the current date, and may also include smaller navigation links. By default our themes include a copyright notice with the current year and the name of the site as entered in the wp-admin panel. If you would like to include navigational links in the footer, please indicate this when you request a theme.

General Style

If you’re having a custom blog theme designed from scratch, developing and finalizing a design is the first step. If you have a clear idea of what you want for the layout and/or a color scheme and some example sites you like, be sure to tell your designer. If you’re not sure, give as much input as possible and then you can fine tune things by giving feedback about the design prototypes your designer creates.

If you’re really unsure of how to decide on a style, you may want to leave much of it up to the designer to see what they come up with, or maybe surf the web to get inspired. Almost every site will have at least one part that you like and one part that you really don’t. This kind of research can help you decide style and layout specifics about your custom theme. Sometimes it helps to look at sites similar to your own in terms of content and target audience, to get some niche-specific ideas.