Online WordPress Theme Generator

With so many good WordPress themes available for free directly from the WordPress site – what is the advantage of an online WordPress theme generator beyond the novelty of it all. Well as it turns out, the way that Yvo Schaap has delivered his WPThemeGenerator proves to be quite useful:

The way Yvo has setup his WPThemeGenerator actually makes it a pleasure to use for 5 reasons:
1)The themes are Widget ready from the get go – not true of all the themes at WordPress.org.
2)The Designer works WYSIWYG – as you make changes the new theme look and layout are refreshed on the right in a sample post layout. This instant feedback is most useful because when you edit a theme in WordPress it is a more tedious save and redisplay sequence.
3)The themes support 2 or 3 column layouts – and all are re-sizable and can have their own color and text formating.
4)It is simple to download in zip file format the final theme design – ready for upload to your website.
5)You can save your theme for later reuse – its stored as a tinyurl so be sure to note that down.
A bonus for developers, is that they can see how different options change the various WordPress theme files – great for learning how to roll your own or making modifications to themes in general.

The downside is that there is bare-bones [or none at all] CSS for images, blockquotes, list formats, tables, etc. So users will have to do their own editing of the generated theme’s CSS  files. Also handling of pages, and comments is also simplified. In most cases it works quite well but in other situations users may want to do their own editing.

So what at first I regarded as a novelty, I now find myself using the Online WordPress Theme Generator more and more often. As a WordPress developer you owe it to try designing your own theme. And if you need any help, just sign up for the Forum where there is lots of help.