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WordPress

Frederik Witte
Frederik Witte
1,411 Points
Posted by Frederik Witte
Frederik Witte
1,411 Points

When building a Wordpress theme, should you build a pure html version first?

I am wondering if there are disadvantages to creating a theme directly from a design and if you should probably make the html version first and then create a theme of this.

Any experienced people here who have tried both and can tell what is better and faster?

Thanks and best regards

Frederik

3 Answers

Kevin Korte
Kevin Korte
28,149 Points
Kevin Korte
Kevin Korte
28,149 Points

I find it faster for me, to get the theme working before spending any time on structure or css. The problem I've ran into in the past building a html version first, is that the wp theme almost always has significantly different html markup, a lot of it coming from wordpress itself. You end up with deeper nested selectors, etc, thus causing me to re-write a lot of my css.

Instead, I just get everything working first, than I worry about the markup and css.

Austin Whipple
Austin Whipple
29,725 Points
Austin Whipple
Austin Whipple
29,725 Points

I've tried both and, if you are the only developer on the project from start to finish, it seems to be a personal preference that determines speed. All depends on how you best work. That said, if you're working on a team with other developers, it's often easiest to take the project in steps: flat mock-ups -> HTML/CSS -> JavaScript interaction -> PHP/WordPress. There are some conveniences that come with being a solo developer that can skip around between those steps, but when it comes to working on teams, it can get a little hairy.

Jacob Mishkin
Jacob Mishkin
23,118 Points
Jacob Mishkin
Jacob Mishkin
23,118 Points

I will agree with Kevin on this, get the theme up and running first. I don't think there is any disadvantage of having a design set prior to coding your theme. In fact I think its the appropriate way to go about development. So far as HTML is concerned I would suggest you use comments instead of markup, it's faster and it still gives to direction as to what you want to do.