Toby's Development Blog Just another PHP / Javascript Developer

Before setting up this blog I had spent a fair amount of time mulling over how I should style this blog.  The three options are obvious;

1. Create a style from scratch
2. Use a free theme and heavily modify it
3. Just use a free theme

I thought I would take some time put my thought process on paper and share it with you.

• Create a style from scratch

Creating a style from scratch is easily the hardest one to complete, however potentially the most rewarding.  You could really get your teeth into the code that Wordpress uses and you could really push the boat out with bells and whistles.  At the very start I thought this was the road I wanted to go down.  I have been under the hood of Wordpress many times making both small cosmetic and functional changes, but I have never had to sit down with any part of it from scratch and work my way up, and I thought this would be an excellent challenge.

The main thing that stopped me from doing this was creative ability and the need to get something up and running quickly.  I am not a graphics designer, it is something I am trying to improve upon but at the moment I only have the most basic knowledge of what makes a good design.  I didn't think it would be fair on my 3 readers to have them endure endless changes to the layout whilst my technique improved.

• Use a free theme and heavily modify it

I have seen this being done a lot and with very mixed results.  I dismissed this out of hand because I think in the time it takes to heavily modify a theme (by which I mean change it enough so as to make it your own) then I think you may as well of started from scratch, it seems fairly lazy in my opinion to take the foundations of what someone has made then chop and change it to suit yourself.

• Just use a free theme

This is most definitely the laziest option, however it is also the one I went for and the one I am going to defend (not that I feel I really need to!) here.

Using a free theme has many advantages; you can install it and have it set up in literally a couple of minutes, all the browser testing as (hopefully) already been completed, you can get all the benefits of have a good designer work on your site but without any associated costs.

It also has a couple of disadvantages; You learn nothing, you end up with a site that is bound to look like at least 100 others.

I am going to sidestep the learning nothing issue by promising myself that I will be making my own design from scratch someday.

I am going to do a couple of things regarding the fact my site will look the same as others, the first is that I plan to make minor changes, whilst overall I am happy with the theme there are a couple of small things I want to change.  I don't think this counts in any way as heavily modifying the site and it will stay true to what the original designer had in mind for it.  The second thing I am going to do about this disadvantage is point out that this is a lovely theme and there are at least 100 other blogs that look damn fine!

Did I make the right choice? Let me know in the comments!