I’ll admit I’ve dropped the ball on this a bit – started the website with good intentions, but never moved past square one or give it the attention it needed. They say consistency is key, but one thing that’s often overlooked is that giving something a go, even if a bit shaky, is still better than doing nothing at all.
So here I am at square one, I thought I’d go a bit meta and dance around my approach for setting up this WordPress-based website, starting with the theme (style).
WordPress is an awesome website platform, abstracting away some of the boring (for some) backend stuff, such as connection to the database that stores all your content, so we can focus on the content and fun stuff. Being a free open-source code base with significant popularity and huge community results in it being super adaptable, configurable in almost every possible way, with a plethora of community contributed themes and plugins available to us.
For theming this WordPress site, I opted for the approach of finding a boilerplate theme to start from a blank slate. Of course, if you find a theme/template on one of the online marketplaces or free repositories that’s exactly or very close to what you want, it might often be a wiser choice to start with that and adapt it via child theming.
Child themes are a useful feature of WordPress (and other CMS platforms such as Drupal), where you essentially specifiy that your theme copies another theme, then makes specific alterations to it.
For this website, I chose to start really basic, choosing Underscores.me as a boilerplate. Provided by (I believe) the same company behind WordPress itself, it’s a self-proclaimed theme meant for hacking and turning into a new theme (rather than using as a parent theme to create a child theme).
Out of the box, it’s super basic-looking – eg: the nav menu at the top of this page appearing as unordered dot-point list like this:
So whilst you wouldn’t use it just straight out of the box, it’s a great blank slate starting point to build upon, since sometimes when working from other, more developed themes, you have to do more work undoing stuff (and nailing down CSS selectors… ugh) to make it look and behave how you want it to.