Builiding WordPress Themes requires mark-up skills set in HTML,CSS & PHP. Building a wordpress theme from scratch needs some repetitive coding and testing . It’s quite obvious that we loose focus when we are looking for right tools,resources and web assets during theme development. Generally, peoples used to inspired by other developers good work. this leads to loose focus and significant delay in the process.

So, What we need to do to stay focus on the development? The answer is, you should have right tools and resources before you start designing and stay focused to shortened up your development time-line. The objective of this post to stay focused on theme development and avoid repetitive work using available open source tools which are absolutely free.

I assume, you have computer with internet connection. Below are my preferred list which i’m currently using. Always, I used to check whether is there any plug-ins or extensions available for firefox or chrome browsers, if not i start looking for open source tools. Most of the time, i found good plug-in/extensions. The good thing is you don’t have to install separately as client and it’s free of cost.

I use one of the free mind mapping tool to organize my projects. You can download it here. http://freemind.sourceforge.net/

Below is the high level minimum requirement to start develop wordpress themes.  This has to further enhanced according to the needs.

Now we know what are all the tools required to start the development. Go and and download the tools one by one and install in your pc. You can complete all the installation with in two hours time. Please do note that this is required only first time. If you have software’s already installed then you can skip those sections.