Hey, I'd just like to say how gorgeous your themes are. Did you learn your skills anywhere? I've been meaning to practice coding. So if you have any advice or tips I'd greatly appreciate it.
Hello !!! Thank you so much, I’m really glad you like them :) It took me 5-6 months, many hours of frustration and countless trial and error sessions to learn how to code a Tumblr theme from scratch. I’m somewhat pleased with my progress so far, but I’m still pretty new at this, so please keep in mind that I don’t exactly claim to be an expert.
First and foremost: Do yourself a favour and check out DASH.GENERALASSEMB.LY. Follow every single step of the tutorials you’ll find there, no matter how simple and obvious they may seem. When I first decided to code, I started with that website and it really helped me a lot. It doesn’t immediately help you to whip up a fancy roleplaying theme, but if you want a general understanding of how HTML and CSS work, it’s a great source. W3SCHOOLS is also a very helpful website, though I like General Assembly better simply because the tutorial steps are more detailed there.
If you DON’T want to get into every detail about HTML and CSS, and simply want to be able to make a theme for roleplaying purposes, check out this tutorial: HOW TO CODE YOUR OWN HOLLYWHOOD THEME. You may have noticed that many roleplayers use Hollywhood’s Themes as base and edit them heavily, and that’s a great tutorial which shows you how. It works on other themes / base codes as well. But please remember to keep the credit of Hollywhood ( or any other theme you choose ) intact if you make a theme using this option. Because no matter how heavily you edit it, you’d still be using someone else’s base code.
For me, the hardest part has always been to code the BASE of a theme, before getting into any of the fun stuff. After you’ve got yourself an OUTLINE, adding all the fancy text, pop ups, hover tabs and whatnot is actually quite easy. I’ve no specific tutorials of my own as of yet, so I’m going to share my favourite tutorial links for all that.
HOW TO CHANGE THE COLOUR OF YOUR SELECTION
HOW TO MAKE POP UP LINKS ( x ) ( x ) ( x )
HOW TO FANCY UP YOUR POP UP PAGES ( x ) ( x ) ( x )
HOW TO MAKE ‘SCATTERED’ LINKS ( x ) ( x )
HOW TO ADD CUSTOM FONTS TO YOUR THEME
HOW TO CUSTOMISE YOUR DATE / NOTE / INFO ( x ) ( x )
HOW TO CHANGE YOUR ‘HOVERING’ LINK / TEXT ( x ) ( x )
HOW TO CHANGE YOUR BOLD / ITALIC / ETC TEXT
HOW TO MAKE A HOVER DROP DOWN CODE ( x ) ( x ) ( x ) ( x )
That’s all I can think of for now, though I’m sure I’m forgetting two dozen other great tutorials. I’ll keep adding them to this post as they come up :) All the credit for the listed tutorials go to the original posters, obviously.
Lastly, even though you didn’t ask, I’m going to drop a few links of base codes here that were designed specifically for roleplaying: DAREDEVIL, WITHGALL and AMYSTHEMES. Right about now, you might be looking at all the links I’ve provided and going ‘Oh hell no, I’m not getting into this.’ Well, if that’s the case, check out those base codes !!! All three of them are so pretty and the original posters graciously shared the codes for public use.
I hope this post was helpful to you ??? I may have rambled a bit since coding is a very wide topic, where specific questions usually work better. So if you do have any more specific questions, feel free to SEND ME AN ASK any time ♥
