over the last few days I've been working on two new tools! friends ask me how to create wordpress themes every now and then, and we've also had people here on designfreaks requesting wordpress starter themes and tutorials for a while now.

I wanted a simple, free solution: upload your index.html, drop in your assets, specify your content wrapper, and get a working theme complete with widgets and menus. most existing options make you install complex software, mess with terminal commands, or spend hours styling blank starter themes like underscores from scratch.

so, here is split, a tool that turns your existing design.html into a full wordpress starter theme and hopefully lowers the entry barrier!

my goal was to keep this as straightforward as possible, so don't let the instructions throw you off! I have a habit of overexplaining, sorry. the rest of the conversion happens completely automatically.

and it doesn't stop there. friends usually gave up on wordpress the second they tried customizing the layout so it "stops looking like a wordpress website", especially when it came to styling blog posts.

that's why I built a companion tool called skinner. you can use it to turn any simple html news skin into a wordpress blog layout (why not try one of ours?). if you remember cutenews, it works on a similar idea: you just drop placeholders like {title} or {text} into your design, and the tool handles everything else.

I hope these two save you hours of work and make creating wordpress themes a lot more accessible, even if you only know basic html!

if you run into any bugs or need a hand, drop me a message. I tested this with all kinds of code, from ancient 2006 layouts to broken, incomplete files, but let me know if anything breaks!

I've also included two video guides below if you prefer learning visually.

until next time! <3