70 PART II • Designing and Developing WordPress Themes
index.php, and for WordPress pages, page.php goes before index.php. Actually, if you use
every one of the possible template files, your index.php file will never load. The concept
is the same, though, so leave things like that for a little while.Now that the basics are out of the way, it’s time to get your hands dirty!THIS IS WHAT YOU’RE DOING
How you go about designing your theme is completely up to you. For your needs in this
chapter, you’ll use the basic blog design shown in Figure 4-2, which actually is a simple plain
HTML file. Sometimes this is all you need to get started.Figure 4-2: A simple HTML design that will serve as the base for your theme.Nothing too fancy, pretty much the same as the blog template dummy shown in Figure 4-1,
right? You’ll be breaking this simple HTML design into template files and making a Word-
Press theme based on it.If you want to take a closer look at the HTML before moving along, it is available in the
download package for this book on the John Wiley & Sons website at http://www.wiley.com/go/
smashingwordpress4e. Because it takes so much space, I won’t reprint it here.A FEW WORDS ON HTML5
I went with a simple HTML5 markup for this example. This means that the code won’t work
particularly well in older web browsers, including Internet Explorer prior to version 9. If you