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Two of my favorite web designers with super helpful blogs, Chris Coyier of CSS Tricks and Jeff Starr of Perishable Press, have just released their new collaboration! The book, "Digging Into WordPress," is now available as a PDF download, and if you buy the PDF book now, you will be eligible for a "sweet discount" on the hard copy of the book when it comes out, plus receive updates free. They've done a great job on this book, which covers setting up WordPress, anatomy of a WordPress theme, theme design and development, extending functionality including using WordPress as a CMS, working with RSS feeds, SEO, dealing with comments, and keeping your site "healthy." I already followed both of these designers before they began their collaboration, and have found countless useful tutorials, code snippets, design ideas, and much more on both of their sites - I've relied on Perishable Press as a source for great unobtrusive javascript code, and on CSS-Tricks for all kinds of other useful tools for making valid, functional, and beautiful sites. This book is bound to be a valuable reference to anyone who works with WordPress.

If you don't have the time to learn CSS or the budget to hire a designer, then CSS Hero WP plugin may just be the virtual hero you've been waiting for.

CSS Hero may not be free, but it is an amazingly powerful customizing tool. Even if you know CSS inside and out, this tool / plugin, expedites the process and is great when you have to meet tight time scheduled site production.

Over the last couple of weeks we've been through the process of creating a stylish blog design in Photoshop, coding it up into a static HTML and CSS concept, and now we'll put the whole thing together as a fully working WordPress theme. Follow this step by step walkthrough of the various WordPress theme files, and see how the HTML is split up and injected with PHP tags to provide the complete blogging functionality.

Chris Coyier (from CSS-Tricks) and Jeff Starr (from Perishable Press) are two of my favorite web design bloggers and writers - they have teamed up to write a book on WordPress, which will be online here and this is the blog that goes with it. Awesome!

Content management systems have effectively replaced much of the tedious HTML and CSS work that was required to make changes to a website. A custom theme for your CMS still takes time and an experienced professional to execute, but business owners no longer face the hassle of learning code or paying a developer for ongoing changes for simple adjustments to content.

The Definitive Guide to Semantic Web Markup for Blogs