The easiest way to start is to use either the Dark Chocolate or Plain Yogurt themes and work of them. It will give you a feel for where all of the files are located (i.e. css, php, etc) how to change the images, look and feel for your site, etc.

Those themes are usually installed when you install concrete5 in the following directory:

/concrete/themes/

the plain yogurt theme is in the default directory and dark chocolate is in dark_chocolate.

Don't do any theme updates in that directory or it will be overwritten whenever you upgrade. Copy the theme(s) into /themes.

Once you get familiar with the coding, CSS, etc you can then move onto creating your own themes.

Thanks for the reply, Yeah I already did that, I'm just wondering what most people do.

Design from scratch or alter templates


thanks again

Depends on how you are doing the design process. If you already have a design in a Photoshop PSD file, or you already have a template as HTML/CSS, I would definitely start it from scratch. But if you don't have a specific design already made and just want to tweak things to arrive at something, then starting with the default templates is better. Also if you're just trying to learn how to build themes, it might be best to start with one of the default themes, but as you get better move over to building them from scratch.

many thanks, I thought so. It's just nice to have your thoughts confirmed by another web designer.

Thanks again