7 Ways a Custom WordPress Theme May Be Better

It’s a grey area if we’re going to be speaking between creating a custom theme or opting for a paid/free theme for WordPress.

But what if there’s more to it that just the price?

That’s one of the key traits to a bespoke (also known as custom) WordPress theme.

#1 Your Imagination Is Your Only Limit

If you have a look at awwwards.com, you will notice that all these award-winning websites don’t use a paid/free WordPress theme.

Upon having a brief look at any of these websites, you begin to discover areas of creativity that might never have been sparked before in your brain!

It’s worth checking out what’s cooking every now and then on awwwards.com. Especially if you include WordPress theme development as one of your skills.

Exploring Adobe’s Behance.net Web Designs category you can see for yourself what the power of art can do in building web interfaces.

And realise that most of these designs’ sections tie in with each other. Like a component that is merging into another section, through the use of position: absolute.

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And to think that you’re stuck to paid/free WordPress themes? No way that’s a self-limiting belief!

The world is a great expanse of the creativity of the human mind!

#2 You Can Test Your Web Development Skills

You’d like to see how awesome you are as a web developer.

Why not create your personal website as a bespoke theme?

You’ll learn the ins and outs of what it takes to build a bespoke theme.

These include getting the basic theme setup. If you’re doing so, I’d like to share my thoughts on why you should alwaysuse a starter theme for creating bespoke themes.

Bottomline: it’ll save you 10,000 hours as you create the scaffold of build tools.

Rather than you having to ‘copy-paste’ your build tools from a previous project.

Like… really? We have the power of automation at our hands. And the power of a great community of web developers contributing to the open-source starter themes.

So why create a bespoke theme from total scratch?

Anyway, it’s part of the test as a web developer to learn how to leverage the power of the internet!

So might as well grab the opportunity whilst it’s out there!

#3 You Can Create Your Own Modules/Components

It’s more about you learning as you develop.

That’s one of the keys to becoming a growing web developer.

You can’t be on Stack Overflow for a sudden moment, and leave the website without thinking a little longer the ‘why is that the answer to the question’.

Yes… It does take a little longer (especially if you’re in the development focus mode where a second feels like an eternity).

But learning the ‘why’ will give you a clue that can be applied later on, etc.

You might not fully understand, but at least grasping the knowledge is a lot better than shrugging off the answer and patching your website up with Stack Overflow…

#4 You Can Maintain Your Own Theme

Now, you must have already started coming across the Git Version Control System.

You can practice even on side projects on using git.

It’s become a staple for web developers I’ve met.

And it’s arguable that you might not even have to use the potential of Git on small web projects.

But implementing it is a good practice.

Like if there would be another web developer who would like to ask access to your git repository to contribute to the theme.

Especially if it’s a large client they would like to make sure that they contribute to the existing repository.

To signal to you that they’re on the same footsteps as you, contributing to a past project and actively moulding your past project with honour.

So that they can ask if they’re unsure about a feature you — the owner — has implemented.

Furthermore, maintaining your own theme for your personal website gives the added security.

So that you will work on a local environment, rather than ‘cowboy-coding’ the production/remote website.

#5 You Can Template Your Own Theme If You Like To

And if you seem to have created a few themes that work well under a certain niche…

Like a Dentist website…

And you happen to have many enquiries of dentists who need a new website…

You can see if they would like the existing dentist-oriented design for a cheaper price.

Yes, they might see that you’re ripping off the designs from other websites.

But if they are alright with the prices, then that’s a good situation to be in since they are happy with the design anyway. And they might not matter as much that their web designer happens to be templating their bespoke theme.

As long as it doesn’t look like 2000 other websites out there, but instead only 2 or so, then that is justifiable with templating the bespoke theme.

So in line with this, they might want a few slight adjustments to make it a little different from the templated theme’s original design.

That’s okay.

Because at least you’re reusing a theme from before rather than starting over again!

#6 You Can Finally Learn from a Website Project You Create

This is an offshoot of #3.

But emphasises that you finally get to do what you have done when you first started out with web development — learning something new.

Slow down a little bit so that you can seep in the knowledge of the documentation implementation.

Like from the WordPress Theme Handbook, or the WordPress Code Reference, to name a couple.

It might take an extra minute here and there as you implement the functions, but you will learn way more than blindly working on the project.

Every project must be a time to learn.

Benefit: you will become a faster web developer after a few projects!

#7 You Create a Fantastic User Experience That You Have Designed

What most people think when they’re developing a website is that they are awesome for having built something that was a concept art.

And have given birth to a living memory.

One that exists on the web for everyone to see.

That everyone is the customer, or the users of that website.

The web designer may be designing the website and the user experience.

But as a web developer, you are the developer of the website and the user experience.

It’s like developing photographs from a dark room.

It’s one of the key parts of creating a website.

And that is bringing it to life in full-swing motion.

As a web developer, you are the problem solver and the final clause to the website theme’s upbringing.

All those little issues are to be directly faced by you.

This includes the minor issues like any device quirks, minor amendments, etc.

Conclusion

And once you have published the new website design, you’ve went through a complete process of development.

It’s not the awesomeness of being a web developer.

But instead, it’s the entire journey and the impact you are paving way for users and customers to say ‘wow’ that’s a sweet website.

Thank you for reading!

If you liked this article you might also like to check out the Best Method to Use for Custom WordPress Theme Development.

Have a nice day!