This book walks the reader from a basic overview and introduction to jQuery with illustrations of how it works with a WordPress site and then starts building enhancements that start off very simply and increase in dynamics as the book progresses. You'll start off with some simple CSS manipulation and move on to creating some sleek visual validation to your site's forms and by the end of the book use the UI plugin seamlessly within WordPress and create a custom rotating slide-show and incorporate AJAX techniques to your site. All the while showing you how to create these enhancements without "breaking up the work-flow" of the WordPress content editors. This book is for anyone who is interested in using jQuery with a WordPress site. It's assumed that most readers will be WordPress developers with a pretty good understanding of PHP or JavaScript programming and at the very least experienced with HTML/CSS development who want to learn how to quickly apply jQuery to their WordPress projects.

Theme design can be approached from two angles. The first is simplicity; sometimes it suits the client and/or the site to go as bare-bones as possible. In that case, it's quick and easy to take a very basic, pre-made theme and modify it. The second is "Unique and Beautiful". Occasionally, the site's theme needs to be created from scratch so that everything displayed caters to the specific kind of content the site offers. This book is going to take you through the Unique and Beautiful route with the idea that once you know how to create a theme from scratch, you'll be more apt at understanding what to look for in other WordPress themes. This book can be used by WordPress users or visual designers (with no server-side scripting or programming experience) who are used to working with the common industry-standard tools like PhotoShop and Dreamweaver or other popular graphic, HTML, and text editors. Regardless of your web development skill-set or level, you'll find clear, step-by-step instructions, but familiarity with a broad range of web development skills and WordPress know-how will allow you to gain maximum benefit from this book.