Article: To be able to follow and complete the tutorial effectively, you should understand the basics of: The purpose of websites HTML and CSS: how they are used to make websitesInsertformulahere{\displaystyle Insertformulahere} PHP: what it is, and how it is used to enhance CMS's: what they are, and how they are used to power websites Drupal: How to set up a simple website using it Don't be put off by this list, however. With enough enthusiasm, you can learn what you need to while following this tutorial. In order to develop a theme quickly and smoothly (without internet-connection-related issues), you should set up a developing environment (a code editor program and a testing server) on your computer. The most common way of doing this is to install a WAMP / LAMP / MAMP stack (W: windows; L: Linux; M: Mac, A: Apache, the server software; M: MySQL, the database software; P: PHP, the server-side script) and download an open-source code editor. Begin by sketching the layout of the home page of your website using a pencil and a clean sheet of paper; you need to feel free to make mistakes and changes. Draw all the parts of a basic web-page, including the header, navigation menu (which may be just below the header or in a sidebar), the page body (for the content), and the footer. You may have other areas in your design. When you're satisfied with your design, recreate your sketched design a graphics program that allows you to design web pages, such as Adobe Photoshop, or even better, Adobe Fireworks. Then make sure you add all the other visual elements; consider the colours and dark-light contrasts, the typography and how it adds to the user's experience, the layout and empty spaces (whitespace is important!), and how content will fit in. Just like in the website design step, it is probably most efficient to only create the web pages of the site that have their own unique layouts, such as the Home page and Contact Us page. Keep the layout as simple as possible, and use modern practices and conventions where possible (such as HTML5 and CSS3). At this point, don't add any server-side scripting (such as PHP), and keep client-side scripting (such as Javascript) to a minimum, in order to not interfere with Drupal's code; this can be added later. to begin theming. Download Drupal and move the files to the server you will use to develop your theme (your testing server - recommended - or an online server). Place the downloaded files into the root folder (if you're using a testing server, it's the www or localhost folder). Use a web browser to navigate to the root folder (e.g. http://www/) and follow the installation process. You should then install any modules that will be useful for theme development. HTML web pages are known as 'static' which means they aren't designed to have content that regularly changes and are built using block-type tags such as 'divs' (and 'header', 'footer', etc. in HTML5). Drupal web pages are a combination of static parts (HTML) and dynamic parts parts that contain content that is expected to be changed regularly. These dynamic parts are called 'regions' in Drupal. An example of a region is a sidebar, where you might want to insert navigational links, a search box, social media buttons, and so on. See the diagram below for a visual representation: The things that you can put into regions are called 'blocks' in Drupal. For example, a search box or a menu are commonly-used blocks. You can insert blocks into regions, re-arrange the blocks, and remove blocks from regions when you log into Drupal on the Structure > Blocks page. Many of the available blocks in a typical Drupal website are provided by the installed modules, but you can create your own blocks on the Blocks page. The content of each web page (the body text, headings, images, and so on) are also placed into a region: the 'Content' region, which is required for all Drupal themes. The content of each web page (or blog post or custom content type) is called a 'node', and is packaged into the Main page content block. In other words, the content of the About Us page is saved into node (with a node type of 'page', of course), and is output to the Main page content block, which is placed in the Content region. Note that sometimes multiple nodes are displayed on one web page through the Main page content block; an example is the front page, which by default shows several of the website's most recent articles (blog posts). Your theme will control the regions, but not what the website administrators put into them. As the themer, you have inform Drupal which regions your theme will have, and register them in files called templates, which are covered in the next section.

What is a summary?
Make sure you're ready to tackle the steps. Set up a developing environment. Design the website. Develop the website using HTML and CSS. Set up Drupal Understand Drupal's web page structure and convert your static pages to it.