Jamumassage.com

Thank you Stigg. The theme was built from scratch. I used to start by using themes like Zen, then I realized there was too many styles to overwrite, thus I figure it's a lot faster to build from scratch, it's just a standard two-column layout.

I'll be happy to share, but if I were to tell you the whole thingamajig I can write a book. So I'll just share with you some quick tips.

To design from scratch, what I did was really just design from scratch! I assume you have adequate skills in CSS and XHTML. Otherwise you must (see my lips: MUST) pick up the skills first before you can go in and bake your own Drupal theme.

The first thing I do is to create the template in HTML and CSS (forget those Drupal theme codes such as $content, $footer_message for the time being). However, make sure you follow the structure of the files as you start. E.g. your template page should be saved under ~/sites/all/themes/(yourtheme)/page.tpl.html, likewise for the CSS file. By the way, I would have sliced out all the needed images and saved them in image folder i.e. ~/sites/all/themes/(yourtheme)/images/.

So I start by building the template in HTML and CSS and I check it constantly by previewing in various browsers. Once the template is perfected, only I will start to insert those theme codes into the correct spots, including the header codes.

Once done, I will login to admin area to enable and switch to the new theme (I presume your site is still on offline mode or you are working in localhost), otherwise the world will see your half completed theme and they will wonder what is going on.

The reason I need to turn on the theme is so that I can start to search and overwrite those default styles churned out by Drupal's built in CSS files, including the circle, square, dot bullet list which are default for most ULs and LIs. There is one other way to deal with this, which is to overwrite all the styles assigned by the built-in stylesheets, but that might just take up too much time and most of them do not show up on the front end of your site anyway. So if you would take my recommendation, copy the whole chuck of relevant classes and ID and styles as and when you see them show up in funny way in your own theme.

I realized it's really hard to explain this in words, when I have some time I might do some video demonstration on this, I just wonder if anyone will be interested to see it? Please raise your hand if you do, that will help me determine if it will worth the effort :)