On WordPress Themes
I work with WordPress a lot. At some points during the year 100% of the work we do a Bravery is in WordPress. Most often we are designing and building custom themes for our clients (or, let’s be honest, I redesign this site’s theme way too often) to fit very specific needs that they have for communicating their messages.
Now, I’ve been building custom WordPress themes for about 7 years. We try our best not to take on work that has us modifying a so-called “Premium Theme” but every once in a while I get caught feeling bad for a client that got burned by their old developer and try to take on fixing some massive pile of… something.
WordPress Themes Should Be Lightweight
I understand the appeal…
OMGZ that theme looks so awesome on ThemeForest and it does 8 million things that we need!!!!!1!!
But the truth is that you absolutely do not need all those features in a theme. See, those theme developers on Envato and other marketplaces are building themes for mass-market appeal. Sometimes they build the same theme to work on a range of web publishing platforms! Their coding standards are questionable (read: bloated, poorly done, open to cross-site scripting attacks, just bad), their designs work because of a massive CSS framework they’ve used, and takes up a massive amount of space in your themes folder.
Those features you think you need become a massive nuisance when you’re stuck changing 150 different field options in a poorly designed user interface just to get the colors to work the way you want them to. Oh, and you don’t want that button to show up? Tough luck, better call in a real developer.
Even worse, when you want to switch to a new theme you have to rework your entire content model because the theme has tried to lock you in by including their own Custom Post Types, Taxonomies, and Custom Fields. Throw data portability out the window unless you know how to handle a MySQL database.
Use WordPress The Way It Was Meant To Be Used
There’s a reason WordPress has such a robust plugins architecture. And many of the best WordPress developers and core contributors have written on the virtues of where to include functionality for your site. Even I go back and forth at times; but in the end it’s important to think about the future. At Bravery Media we actively think about the next steps. We don’t want the stuff we build to lock you into one pattern or make it more difficult for you to redesign in a year or two.
For future-proof WordPress theme development, it’s important to consider plugins that your theme will work with. We love Elliot Condon’s great Advanced Custom Fields plugin and rely on it a lot. We love aspects of the WordPress Jetpack plugin and often employ its built-in analytics, social sharing, login integrations, and image CDN to speed up and improve the site’s we’re building. The technology exists and is built a lot quicker and cleaner than the majority of premium themes out there.
The best part is that you can switch themes on the fly and all you (or your theme developer) have to do is make sure the theme’s code supports what exists. Your content is readily available to any theme that wants to take advantage of it.
Build Custom, or Don’t
If you’re serious about your website — serious enough to spend a bit of money on it — you shouldn’t be considering a pre-packaged theme. Many professional design/development shops won’t touch your requests to modify that purchased theme because they know the amount of work involved in cutting through the clutter and mess of someone else’s poorly written code. We’re that way. We have dealt with those kinds of themes time and again. It’s time-consuming and frustrating, and that means it’s expensive.
But if you’re not that serious about setting yourself apart through custom design, that’s cool too. By all means spend that money on something that looks shiny and a few thousand other people are using on their WordPress sites. But please don’t bring it us wanting it modified. It’s not fast. It really doesn’t make our development time quicker.
Custom built is almost always better.
Update
A friend of ours pointed out that I didn’t do a very good job of addressing what those who can’t afford a custom site theme should do. The first thing is get some help finding a good premium theme site. Don’t buy something because of the woo-fancy features it has. Buy it for its design and code provenance. There are thousands of plugins that will fill in the gaps for features that you want.
At the same time, if you’re looking for a simple blog or personal portfolio site it’s not as big of a deal. The issue is more when you need to develop a site with a lot of custom content — especially on a professional level.
Originally published at braverymedia.co on August 22, 2014.
