We've built a 'skeleton' template to help you get started if it's your first time building a site in Pearl. It's in standard Themes format, including the three index.html, product.html and product_listing.html template files, along with styles.css. They all contain the most commonly used widgets/objects, but don't have any other markup with the exception of the index template, where we've built a standard 3-column layout using Matthew Levine's holy grail technique. The stylesheet references every important ID/class that Pearl outputs, even those that the template files don't call for (account styling, contact forms, checkout process etc) and are organised and commented throughout for ease of understanding, but are completely without rules. It's a great stylesheet to start any theme off as you won't have to trail through the source to see what you can hook onto.

We've kept it purposefully skinny so you can strip out what you don't need, and then build on the basics to produce your own theme. Or you could just use it as reference. It has a main container width of 960px so you can easily divide up the width as you see fit (if you're not familiar with the 960 grid idea, it's worth checking out), or simply set the width to 100% for a fully functional liquid layout.

The theme is available through the theme loader (Website > Design & Layout > Theme Loader), or as a download here. We'd recommend using the theme loader as it'll drop the files straight into your account as an active theme, but the offline version is handy both as reference or if you prefer to work that way.