1) You can learn CSS and do it from scratch.  CSS and PHP are the basic building blocks of WordPress. There are other technical languages you might want to pick up as well. A good place to start learning CSS and PHP is at ThinkVitamin.com

2) You can design a mock-up of your website in Photoshop or other creative type software or even draw/paint and then scan your work. Once you’ve created a picture of what you want your template to look like you can send it to a designer who can cut it up into pieces which can then be used to compose a wordpress template you can easily use.

3) You can simply pay a designer to design the wordpress design for you, although this could prove to be costly depending on whom you hire and how much work needs to be done.

4) You can design your own wordpress template using Artisteer without touching a bit of code. Artisteer has a nice what-you-see-is-what-you-get  interface that makes designing your on wordpress template easy and fun.

5) If you are a windows user you can use an Adobe Photoshop plug-in called Divine that will cut your design into a wordpress template for you. Right now there is only a windows version of the plug-in. I am eagerly anticipating their mac version of the plugin..

I’ve been quite interested in the Thesis WordPress theme because it’s one of the most talked about themes out there and for a very good reason.

Why Thesis Is Better

Thesis is one of the best WordPress themes you can have because of the supreme flexibility it offers as well as the SEO advantages.  Just like many before me, I was frustrated with tweaking previously created WordPress themes. Thesis is designed to with airtight code so it loads faster. No matter how you change the look of your website, the underlying primal code remains unchanged and this is quite important from an SEO point of view.

The default Thesis theme will give you a basic working website right out of the box. The settings panel is very detailed with options for changing the fonts, colors, scripts and a large number of other settings. Any changes you want to make are made to only two custom files within the Thesis panel interface, which makes customizing it much easier. A big plus is being able to upload your header and faveicon files directly to the website.

The Thesis Options Panel

Thesis Unique Hooks Feature

What makes Thesis unique is a system called hooks. Basically it allows you to design your website and put things exactly where you want them. The Thesis website references tell you where these hooks are and several websites out there actually