My Experience with Child Themes in WordPress

When I first started modifying WordPress themes, I did that the wrong way, which involved editing existent themes with my styles, and how painful that was when one client did an auto-update for the theme a while later washing out all my work!

Then I took  a step further by building my own themes based upon blank themes, those themes give you a fully functional WordPress template with no styling at all, and this went quite well for some time, although it was kind of doing a lot of work each time with the basic structure and formatting for all elements over and over again. I used Blank theme by Chris Coyier, then Starkers theme by Elliot Jay Stocks.

Starker Blank Theme

Recently I heard a lot about the concept of Child themes, and soon it became my favorite way of creating WordPress-based sites most of the time, and here is why…

Read more >>

Best WordPress themes I’ve worked with

As a WordPress designer I’ve worked with lots of themes from different sources, and over the time I could tell which were good ones and where were not.

I will try to cover here some of the best themes I’ve worked with to give you a heads up on where to go when looking for quality themes.

1. Blank or Bare-bones themes:

If you’re a designer like me, you would be looking for themes that have no styling at all to apply your custom work to it, and there are some really good ones for this:

• Blank Theme by Chris Coyier
• Starkers theme by Elliot Jay Stocks
• Thematic by Theme Shaper which uses the principle of Child theme to customize.

2. Quality Free Themes:

One of the greatest thing about WordPress is the availability of thousands of quality free themes for it to make it super easy for you to find any style you’re looking for, and here are some of the best I’ve seen:

Read more >>