I started my designer career with a proxy design, after which a php link directory design, and the 3rd design type i made was Wordpress design.

About 1 years ago i was making themes and i was auctioning them and selling them for 10-30$/piece, well for more than 8 months i didn’t auction any theme, i only do custom designs now, and to be honest i enjoy the most designing wordpress themes.

I am a designer, not a coder, you can thank all the coding wonders in styleicious and chameleon themes to BETng4U, i just came up with the ideas, he made all the magic work!

They say that you can either be a designer or a coder. I completely approve this sentence. You can’t design and code in the same quality. You either give 100% at designing, either you give 100% at coding.

Jumping to the point of this blog post, what i want to talk to you guys about today are 2 plugins that are mandatory for a wordpress theme designer/developer.

1) Theme Switcher

Theme Switcher allows your readers to switch among installed themes.

If a customer asks you to show previous live demos of your work this plugin is ideal, you don’t need to setup wordpress 100 times, you just add the following code to the sidebar and he will be able to preview all the uploaded themes(make sure you add the code to all the theme’s sidebarm):

<li>Themes:
<?php wp_theme_switcher(); ?>
</li>

The default link is: index.php?wptheme=themename

with a little mod_rewrite magic you can rewrite that URL to yourtestsite.com/themename/

2) Theme Test Drive

Theme Test Drive Wordpress plugin allows you to safely test drive any theme on your blog as administrator, while visitors still use the default one. It happens completely transparently and they will not even notice you run a different theme for yourself. Best part is you can even set the testing theme options (if it has them) in the Admin panel while you are testing the theme.

This plugin is great for testing if you aren’t working on localhost, by using this theme as stated above your testsite’s visitor won’t even notice that you are working on a theme. Cool isn’t it?

You can easily enable/disable it from your admin panel in the Presentation tab. There you will be able to select the theme you want to testdrive.

I’m sure both of these plugins will serve you the best on your journey to perfect your wordpress theme developing skills