asek

If your just starting to learn HTML, CSS etc, creating a WordPress theme is probably a bit too complex, but if you still want to have a go, this is a pretty good resource: http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/tutorials/basics-create-a-clean-magazine-blog-theme-day-1-design/

The only problem with using the Twenty Eleven theme is it uses a lot of custom functions to create excerpts, titles etc. For a beginner, it will make things a lot more complicated, maybe after you get to grips with the basics, use the Twenty Eleven theme to possibly make your own base theme.

Although tutorials are great at getting an overview, I always feel taking another theme, such as Starkers is a great way to work out exactly how everything is put together. Have a read of : http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Hierarchy which explains how the different files interact and which files are loaded when viewing a site. Also when you start coding, the best place to refer to is the WordPress Codex, it contains documentation on nearly all the template tags so you can't go wrong.

Interesting concept, but I don't really like those squares in between each section because it makes the page look messy or that something has gone wrong. I've seen similar sites use images or cartoons which really give the site a personality and maybe its something you could do to make it more visually pleasing. I couldn't remember the exact link to the site I was thinking about, but this site has the same single-page scrolling concept but looks better: http://www.ormanclark.com/ Also the white text on an orange background doesn't work, it makes the text hard to read. Maybe change the background colour to something else.

It's unlikely to be a single plugin, instead it would probably use a few animation plugins which are used to create the effects you see

Thanks, I think what the guy is saying is design your page normally so the homepage would still be your normal homepage. Then with JavaScript hide the contents and place the ad gate text/verification on top. If they are verified then just set a cookie to save the selection and unhide the content or if they fail redirect to a failure page. The Googlebot and most search engines do not have JS so they wouldn't trigger the age gate and would see the normal page. I've never done this before so I wouldn't know for sure if this would pass the Google standards but it seems to be the only way to do it.

I've used http://byethost.com/ before to test WP themes on different servers.

This came up in a Google search. It should be accepted if you put into place a JS age gate. http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/018520.html

Its an interesting design, but I'm not sure what it really is. I think you need to describe or draw attention to what it actually is. Also the left sidebar is quite distracting and doesn't really add any information. Take a look at the width of the design, you've added a left margin which means that users with smaller screens only see half the page without scrolling.

If your just looking to get into WordPress, you don't need to know PHP too well, you can get by with the WordPress reference plus the basics. However if you want to start developing server side apps, I would recommend learning it properly as you need to write well structured code. If you enjoy front-end coding, stick to that and develop and market yourself as a good front end designer.

In the php.ini file there is often a post_max_size declaration as well which may be set to 8M. Ask your host to change this as well as the upload_max_size. I'm not on my Windows machine at the moment, but right click on the WAMP icon in the system tray and find the php.ini file. You can search for the declarations as above and increase the default values. You also need to restart the servers and you should be able to upload bigger files!

I prefer a single larger screen rather than multiple screens. I always find that I never use the second screen that much apart from videos and reference docs.

How old is the site? Sites can take a while to appear in search listings. Because your site appears in Yahoo/Bing it probably means that there is nothing more you can do. Btw Bing powers Yahoo search so they should show the same results.

Agree with Mike, the light blue makes it hard to read. To sell, I think it is a bit basic and doesn't seem worth paying for compared to free themes but for experience, you may want to try and create a WordPress version

Ah I see. If your using repeated gradients you may benefit on separate images for those, you could use a 2px repeating gradient. I guess you could reduce the total file size by a large amount. But 200K isn't that bad so I would leave it for now and if you have time work on reducing it.