Terrific 2nd Starting Place For Me

Last year I paid someone to turn an old HTML website design of mine into a dynamic WordPress theme. They did a great job, but there remained a few things that I had a really difficult time altering to suit my personal tastes (instead of paying them extra to remove things I’d not asked for in the first place).

I spent a lot of time trying to create my own theme from scratch so it only had exactly what I wanted and nothing else. I had a lot of trouble with that. Fixing one thing broke another.

When I ran across BlankSlate I realized this would be the solution I needed. I quickly eliminated all the bits and pieces I knew I wouldn’t use for my purposes and set about building the StyleSheet from the one I used on my old static site and some from the theme I had created. I’m still tweaking here and there but it’s almost entirely exactly the way I want – and the stuff I’ve learned along the way is fantastic and comes in handy from time to time. At least now I can look at the source of my custom theme and almost immediately know what I’m looking at. It’s almost like learning a foreign language.

EDIT: I also know to insure I maintain multiple backups, zipped and so forth. A lot of people new to WordPress do not realize that all their hard work can be instantly vaporized with one simple click of an update button. So every time I make a change to my theme, I make a backup of it offsite in the event something goes wrong.

Many thanks.