Creating a WordPress theme from scratch is not hard. I’ll hold your hand through it.

Tutorials on this topic is being written while you reading this post and the WordPress website also has guides for you to follow. But are those tutorials and guides really helpful to you when you don’t understand the lingo? Even I got lost while reading the WordPress guides.

Tools – Before we get started, you’ll need:

• WordPress installed on your computer. Follow the instructions on Installing WordPress Locally Under Windows XP. If you can’t install WordPress on your computer for whatever reason, no worries, just make a dummy WordPress install on your website.
• Notepad or other text editors. I use Notepad ++, you can find it at www.downloads.com.
• SmartFTP – If you’ll be testing your theme online, I’d suggest that you download and install SmartFTP or another FTP program to upload your theme files.
• Bookmark XHTML Validator and CSS Validator. You’ll need those tools to validate your theme. They also come in handy when you need to spot and fix errors.