I'm looking to convert the homepage of http://nkingdom.com into a blog to help drive in more traffic. I'm wanting for the wordpress template to be basically the same as the my vbulletin template. So what I am wanting to know is is there a tutorial out there that could help me do this, or would I need to seek out a web designers help.

If I need to find a web designer, does anyone know of any that are extremely cheap, since I don't think this should be something that is too difficult, right?

Thanks for any help.

It all depends on how much HTML and CSS you know. There is a video screencast here http://css-tricks.com/video-screenca...ress-part-one/
that will walk you through creating a custom design from scratch.

FYI - If you are looking for custom Wordpress theme designers for "extremely cheap" I wouldn't wait too long for them to jump at that offer. It is a highly sought after skill with blogs being so popular.

Alright, I think that video will help me get a very good start and get quite a bit done. Thanks a lot.

And as for a cheap designer, in the past what I have found for a few things are some up and coming developers who are just looking to get some experience and build a portfolio and such, so I was able to get work done much cheaper than the normal price. Of course, the quality wasn't as good as a well established developer, but it was good enough for me.

As someone above said, it depends on the amount of XHTML/CSS you know, but you also have to realize that when you turn them into wordpress themes you have to worry about PHP and mySQL as well as just XHTML/CSS, not so much mysql but you have to know php when it comes to calling in parts of the theme.

If you are not very educated in that, it can be very difficult, there are several free themes out there you can get and twink to try to meet your design, but to be 100% unique and look the best you need to have a custom theme designed.

We do wordpress themes and integration and we are located here in the United States and work on contact basis so you can feel protected, if you would like our services let us know, you can visit our site at http://www.sismediagroup.com

What type of template you are interested? Any objective for your blog?

You're right Shawn, it does help to have some knowledge of php and MySQL for any Wordpress modifications. I was pointing him to a tutorial that clearly didn't dive deep into the PHP aspects of the design, but rather worked around it "design-wise" with html and css.

Good point though.

Yes, php is actually very important for the functionality of the site, i mean you can get by with just xhtml/css for designing the site, but if your site is to have functionality then you need to know php.

We had to learn this the hard way lol, we started getting into wordpress when it was first released and didn't have a very well trained php expert on our team lol.

You can look for a cheap developer on odesk.com. There are a ton of developers who know wordpress on there who are willing to work for dirt cheap. I used to try to get projects there but kept getting undercut by people working for nothing.

Thanks guys...I ended up finding a really cheap template that I thought would be a good starting base and am editing it from there. I think its coming out pretty well so far:

http://nkingdom.com

I like it, fits your site well.

Thanks

It looks great! So much easier when you have a solid starting point.

Looking sharp.

Originally Posted by racer x

It looks great! So much easier when you have a solid starting point.

Agreed! Keep it up with putting time into it. Not just into the look and what not but into keeping that steady stream of traffic flowing into it