This is a part of The Complete Guide to Make your Own WordPress Theme

Introduction

A basic wordpress theme should have a header, navigation menu, content, sidebar and footer. This is illustrated in the image below:

Header

Here lies your logo and usually, page or category navigation menu, and search box. It is also a common practive that google ads were placed here, so leave some space in the design to fit in the ads.

Content

You should make 2 seperate design for the content area:

• Latest posts at blog index. For each post, you can show its category, date posted, comment count and author name.
• Single post page with comments area (when you clicked into a post)

Sidebar

A sidebar should display important resources like category, recent posts, recent comment, blog roll and more. Some themes also put a search box at sidebar.

Footer

Here lies the copyright (eg: © 2009 zenverse , Powered by WordPress) and link back to theme author.

Be creative

Of course, you do not have to follow this old style. What we have discussed above is a very basic & plain theme. You can be creative, change their position, add more features and make your theme special. We will discuss the features you can add to your theme later.