I have recently begun to redesign my own theme for my France Tales blog. I have gone through a couple of themes and have liked some parts of the themes and wished for other parts to be included in a WordPress theme. I have also been trying to get a job in web design and development here in France. PHP and/or Java seems to be a requirement so I thought I would begin to learn PHP by designing my own theme.

I started to learn PHP and to design my own WordPress theme by using this tutorial series at WPdesigner. It was very helpful to explain each of the PHP calls in the WordPress loop. I made a very simple theme that I may use to expand upon to make a fully featured theme.

Often I kept going back to the WordPress site to ask questions in the forums or for references. I rediscovered the WordPress Codex. There is a wealth of resources for all aspects of designing your own WordPress themes. I would recommend the above tutorial on WPdesigner to see if you really want to go through with it. Then if you decide you are going to commit to it, I’d recommend carefully going through the WordPress codex as it will cover in greater detail and accuracy all you need to know.

Do you know of any other great Design your own WordPress themes tutorials?

• 80 How to Sites in a nice list

this overs everything from productivity, to GTD, to hacks and gadget hacks, and ther useful life hacks.

• Dev Listing

is a great site for any kind of web development project. There are tutorials in every language and examples for inspiration.

Below is a list of tutorials I have found useful in developing websites. There will be everything from menus to 2, 3, 4 column layouts, rounding corners, and more. Feel free to add resources in the comments.

• Huge List of Web Development Resources
• Lists and Menus
• More Lists and Menus
• Listutorial takes you through the basics of building background image lists, rollover lists, nested lists and horizontal lists
• Floatutorial takes you through the basics of floating elements such as images, drop caps, next and back buttons, image galleries, inline lists and multi-column layouts
• Find out more about selectors including the structure of rules, the document tree, types of selectors and their uses. There is also a step-by-step tutorial showing how selectors are used in the process of building a 3-column layout
• Web Standards Checklist
• Excellent Web Resources