Creating new regions in a Drupal theme that you can publish blocks too, is extremely easy.

edit your “themename.info” file:

regions[name_of_new_region] = name of new region

then output the region in your “page.tpl.php” file:

<?php if ($name_of_new_region) print $name_of_new_region; ?>

The problem  you may run into (and the point of this post), is that during development of your theme, the new regions may not show up in your Drupal blocks page.  What you will need to do, is head over to your “build/themes” page and set another theme as your default temporarily.  Once another theme is saved as the default, reselect your theme and set it as the default once again.  This will load your new regions, and you should now be able to publish blocks to them.

I didn’t see mention of this problem on other sites, so I thought I would throw it out there in case anyone else had the same frustration!