ThemesPress, a site which promises to turn your static HTML into a fully functioning Wordpress theme for $10 has launched. Whilst it is not particularly difficult, as I understand it, to turn HTML into a Wordpress theme manually, when I tried a litte while ago I failed initially, and couldn’t be bothered to spend the time to make it work, a feeling which I am sure many people have. I thought I’d try out ThemesPress to see if it worked.

I was pleasantly surprised. In the first step, I uploaded the images used in the HTML, then entered the HTML, placing various special template tags into the code, such as {CONTENT} for where I wanted the Wordpress loop to go. After uploading the CSS and setting various options, I was able to preview the theme in a dummy WP installation and make necessary changes.

As it turns out, it is a well structured theme. It is widget enabled, and everything is very clear and easy to edit. I doubt I will ever need to use ThemesPress again, as now I have the necessary template code in a template that I understand, as I coded it, and I will therefore be able to easily manually covert to a theme myself in the future.

All in all, hopefully we will see more custom themes in the future, as this definitely makes it easy for non-php gurus to easily create Wordpress themes, which can only be a good thing.