I want to become a GetSimple theme designer

[Connie]

when this WIKI does not help you, is too complicated for your level of experience, what kind of web business do you want to run?

Each system has it's own system for templates, you will encounter this kind of "php / code talk" with WP, Joomla, CMSMS, Drupal, Typo3 ... the list is long and there are thousands of hungry, savy designers / developers out there ... so you must keep up with them or you will have no success ;=(

if that is too difficult for you, you should start to learn, without that knowledge you will be lost

nothing about php - which I assume is needed to integrate designs with the getsimplecms code

no, you just must be able to save a textfile with the extension .php
and you must be able to copy and paste some template tags into your layout

first steps?

- design a layout with stylesheet for a static page. If you have a PSD, I am sure you can export that to a static HTML file, yes?
- study existing themes
- save your layout as standard-template for GS
- replace the different elements of the layout, f.e. navigation, with the template tags
- test in GS

if you have questions, ask them here and show how far you have come ... you are welcome!