WP Theme Generator – Create your Own Theme in Minutes

WordPress Theme Generator, from WordPress Theme Shock and iconShock is an excellent service that helps you build your own custom WordPress theme with ease.

The service

It’s a service like I’ve never seen before. By going to their website, you can develop your own WordPress theme and see it come together before your very eyes.

Once you arrive at WordPress Theme Generator, you’ll see a default theme, and a tool pane that allows you to customise most elements of the site, from a gallery of more than 1000 pre-made items.

I was quite surprised at the level to which you can customise certain features, such as the dividers between page sections, the top bar, shadows, patterns, shines, slider type and frame, icons, fonts and the search box.

There are seven default layouts that you can start from, which change where the main site elements appear, and within each of those layouts, there are eight widgetised sidebars that you can either turn on or off, to create highly customisable areas. The seven layouts are somewhat similar and don’t offer the variety of layouts that you might come across by scrolling through ThemeForest for example.

As a service, they’ve really gone out of their way to make it as easy as possible to create your theme. You can save your progress at any time and come back and continue modifying your theme. Additionally, there’s a colossal gallery of themes that people have already made, which are not only great for inspiration; you can also use them as a starting point by clicking on the Load button, which will load up the design in the generator and allow you to further customise it as you wish.

One area that I think the generator falls short is that, while it gives you a million different options for how your theme can look from their pre-defined gallery of design elements, there are some things that you can’t customise, like the body text font color – they provide an array of greys from black to white to choose from, but what if you wanted to specify a particular color? You’re out of luck I’m afraid.

With that said, there’s enough customisation to give you some great choices and make some really magnificent themes. Just browse the gallery if you’re not convinced.

Pricing

Browsing and designing your theme from the outset is completely free. That’s one of the biggest appeals – you can see exactly what your theme will look like before you ever commit to buying something.

Beyond that, you essentially need to subscribe to their service to have access to the framework. This costs $29 for 6 months. Once you have the framework though, you do have the advantage of being able to create as many themes as you want under your subscription, so whether you just get one theme, or make 50, it’s still the same price.

Once you install the framework on your site, you can modify all the site elements, like you could on the site generator, from within your own dashboard, so if you’re not quite sure about something, you can make a little change from your own dashboard.

Conclusion

WP Theme Generator a very easy-to-use service and easily enables you to customise your very own WordPress theme in a matter of minutes. The finer details of customising your theme are perhaps lacking, but it’s a great service for getting a unique look, quickly and at a good price.