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 I already remembered 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.
The pre-built themes contain a lot of extra stuff as they’re meant to be customized, so if I had looked at one of those instead to get to grips with building a WordPress theme again I might have found myself sifting through code I didn’t need to look at. My starter theme is pretty basic so I was already able to see the road ahead, if you like, instead of getting bogged down.
The cons
As with any starter theme, I imagine, a bunch of assumptions had already been made by me when I built it. That meant I started off using what I’d already built, for example for the small screen menu, but when I wanted to change direction it was a bit more of a fight. If I had just built the menu from scratch it probably would’ve just been a good experience for me. Another similar point is a bunch of helper classes I had written way back when; coming at this several years after I had written this starter theme meant I wasn’t familiar with that and so wasn’t really able to make the most of it as I would have done at the time of making it.
In conclusion
It’s simply a trade-off how quickly I was able to get going with my own theme without starting from the ground up, but losing the experience I would’ve gained by going the long way round and building it from the ground up again. I might, at some point, rebuild it from scratch and see how I get on.