Building this website

About 5 years ago, I didn’t yet know I was going to take a career break to raise my son. I was building projects, mostly custom WordPress themes, and I was starting from scratch each time but there were certain things I pasted in from previous projects to get started quickly. Mostly some basic CSS styles. Most of my projects required certain things such as Custom Post Types too and I’d go back and copy the code rather than write it out by hand each time. For one project, I copied in everything I thought I’d want at the start, popped in some basic HTML such as a header/navigation bar and a footer, some functions in functions.php, and kept that as my starter theme.

It was really bare bones but it got me started quickly on new projects. They were always renamed of course, but it was a place to start. Over a couple of projects I added a few other little bits like the Javascript to handle the mobile navigation menu. Then, it all took a back seat and I was a full-time dad. A very conscious and positive decision, but coming back to Web Development now I decided to dust off that starter theme to build my new website. What were the pros and cons? There are no big revelations here and neither am I trying to suggest my conclusions can be adopted widespread, but here are my thoughts.

The pros

It really did get me started quickly. I hadn’t written any serious code since the start of 2022, but looking through the starter theme got me going. It helped me get past some boring bits so I could just start building it. That was super helpful as naturally I was going back and forth to documentation/MDN reminding myself of how to do everything.