By Justin Laing
1. Find a theme you want to base your new theme off of. A good place to start is the default theme, but you may also want to just tweak another theme that’s closer to the look/feel you are going for.
2. Copy the existing theme to a new directory in your themes directory for example if I was making a theme called “webdesign_meetup” I might copy the “default” directory into a new directory called “webdesign_meetup”.
3. In your new theme directory edit the style.css file. You should see something
like this in that file:
/*
Theme Name: WordPress Default
Theme URI: http://wordpress.org/
Description: The default WordPress theme based on the famous Kubrick.
Version: 1.6
Author: Michael Heilemann
Author URI: http://binarybonsai.com/
*/
4. Edit the theme information. This is the information that will show up under Presentation -> Theme in the administrator.
5.Go into the WordPress administrator and change your current them to the new one you just created.
6. Now you can start customizing and see the affects in real time on your site!