As I stated a few days ago, I mistakenly broke my previously used FastTrack theme. I liked it very much because of the main photo at the top. There depicted a young men with a rucksack walking along underground station. As his face was hidden and his picture was blurred, his character resembled me. I like wearing rucksacks and usually use subway if I need to get somewhere. This fact made the theme quite personal, and I didn’t need to customize it more for a long time. After I broke the theme and I had some hours to get down to WordPress Themes internal kitchen, I created my own theme.
To not take long, I’ll write my work log:
WP Theme editing on the local machine
Editing a WP theme remotely is a real pain. In this case, you have to upload/download your theme sources every time you change something. More easy way is a installing your WP copy on the local machine. There are lots of howto-s over the Internet. I’m little bit familiar with Apache+PHP+MySQL bundle, and installed it within 30 minutes. After this, I downloaded my current WP files from my hosting directory and upgraded it the latest WP version (2.2).
Tools
I took the FastTrack theme as a base for my new theme. The markup of all themes are very similar, because all of them uses the same layout: header, content, sidebar and footer. All parts are stored in few .php files with correspondent and clear names. The appearance of a theme is mostly determined by СSS file with styles of all parts. Hence almost all time you have to work with a CSS file editor. For this purpose I chose the great FireBug Add-On which show all comprehensive information about a web page including a CSS styles and HTML components on the page. PHP files I edited with Komodo and CSS styles with TopStyle. For choosing right color schema I found out cool on-line tool for color schema generation – kuler.
Creation
I took one of my photos which looked fine as a header image and cropped it to the proper size. Then I tidied up all unnecessary elements like top navigation, odd styles, etc. The width of the post area became wider on 100px. Then I chose a color schema using kuler. It took some time to play with links appearance and font sizes. And in a few hours the new theme I called harpsichord was done.
If you want to customize your theme, I can suggest you starting from Guides to creating your own themes.
P.S.
I eventually tasted the new-brand Eclipse chewing gum 
For those who are unfamiliar with my special interest to it, I’d say that Eclipse is the most popular open-sourced IDE for Java language (not only however).
