Creating your own theme in WordPress can be a bit challenging — more so if you’ve had no previous experience with WordPress, and very little experience or true understanding of PHP.

I think I could have had my beautiful new website completed in about 2-3 days if I hadn’t decided to try to create it in WordPress. It only took me a day to come up with the visual design, and less than a day to code it in XHTML and CSS, and my design and pages validated at that time for both HTML and CSS. Admittedly, this was probably a bass-ackwards approach, but I started with what I knew, figuring I would figure out the WordPress stuff later.

And mostly, I have. Well, not like I could rewrite much more PHP code than a tiny expression or two, but at least I get the way WordPress breaks up the whole content and style across various parts that come together when the page is called. The header, the index page (and it’s work-alikes, such as the the archive page, the “page” page, etc.), the sidebar(s), and the footer get assembled with an external css file when the page is called, and together — with any images and database content — make up the complete page that is displayed. Your website consists of no html files — it’s all php files that may have some css and some html included within, plus the css stylesheet(s), images, and some javascript files. The content primarily resides in a database.

But the tricky part is that divs may begin in one php file and end in another, and if your content, style and code are fairly complex, you can get lost, and leave out a crucial beginning or ending div from the proper file, and then all hell breaks loose, position-wise!

Then, of course, there are the browser issues.

And finally, in my case, I knew I wanted a very specific style of css gallery for my design portfolio images, and had created it even before designing the visual look of my new site — and it’s simple in a way, but complex in another.

More details forthcoming later today.