Tom Hapgood teaches various multimedia design courses including elements of animation, web design, motion design, and typography. He discusses customizing a WordPress theme by modifying the template files that make up the theme, including the header, content, sidebar, and footer files which are pieced together to display the site's content and design. A WordPress theme determines the graphical interface and underlying design of a blog without changing the core software.

1. “Making it Mine” Customizing a WordPress Theme Tom Hapgood

6. Web Design 1(Dreamweaver/WP / HTML/CSS)

7. Web Design 2(Flash/video/SecondLife)

8. Motion Design(Final Cut Pro, After Effects)

9. Typography (InDesign, After Effects)

16. The director of the girls chorus does this:

17. She doesn’t have time (or interest) in this:

19. WordPress structure

20. Typical WordPress Layout Header Content Sidebar Footer

21. Individual template files come together “on the fly” when a page is requested by the web browser. header.php content.php Header Content Sidebar sidebar.php Footer footer.php

23. mySQL Database (content) HTML CSS Page structure <markup code> Page presentation (layout, colors, type, sizes, etc.)

24. Or, you could say…

25. CSS (party) HTML (business)

27. A WordPress Theme is a collection of files that work together to produce a graphical interface with an underlying unifying design for a weblog. These files are called template files. A theme modifies the way the site is displayed, without modifying the underlying software.

35. Piecing it together

46. Header

47. Header Menu

48. Header Content Menu

49. Header Content Menu Sidebar

50. Header Content Menu Sidebar Footer

64. The site in its present form.