Wordpress theme development doubts

Hi!

I've been where you are 4 years ago. I started as Junior Web Developer and my first task was building a WordPress Theme from scratch and i was like" WTF, how should i do this?" The Treehouse courses helped a lot. I spent afterwork surfing the library for specific stuff i needed to complete my job task. Trust me it get's easier as you develop your skills and your brain adapts to more complex thinking - in 6 months from now you will be like 'heck that was actually not that hard' and you will be doing more complex stuff. It does not stop :-)

2 years ago I built my first WooCommerce Theme from scratch - it took time and lots of research, learning, lots of trial and error, but now I've built several WooCommerce Stores and have developed new skills. This is what makes ours jobs awesome - you will never ever stop learning new things. And you should never ever stop trying new stuff. Dive into it and you will succeed.

Another question, how does most people start? I mean, is it common practice to start with a barebones theme like underscore, and then build it from there like it is shown in that course, having a design made and port it over to Wordpress?

This is a question of preference and how the workflow is set up in your company. Some companies have own people that build static prototypes first and then you would build a theme using those html templates. I personally have my own custom starter theme and build from scratch. Been building custom themes for several years now and know all the important WP functions by heart. There is still not a day where I don't run into some issue and have to look things up.

As a beginner it may be easier building a static html template first and then use that as a starting point for your theme. You will understand better how WordPress themes work.

And finally, while there's a lot of material in Treehouse about Wordpress, I'm not finding a good structure to learn this, I'm just randomly selecting courses and doing them, can anyone point me to a more step by step, structured resource to learn about how to do Wordpress theme development?

Again this is matter of preference. I rather choose my topics myself and learn on the job. So e.g. if i have a specific problem and I am stuck, i usually google the issue and check sites like stackoverflow for solutions or check the treehouse library for a specific course and browse through it. e.g. I had to build a custom WP Plugin and had no idea how to start, so I watched the treehouse wp plugin course, caught up the basics and worked from there on. BTW I kinda learned PHP and JavaScript learning WordPress Development. So you don't always have to follow the A to Z approach ;-)

I would recommend building several themes from scratch and not relying on free or premium themes. There is no better way of fully understanding theme development than building your own themes and plugins. Also the pay is usually better if you can do this.

Hope this helps a bit. It's a struggle at the beginning and there will be times where you will be frustrated or maybe even feel dumb - this is absolutely normal and all of us devs went through this. The trick is to keep going on and do your best.

Im a current developer and i work in wordpress. We usually start with a theme and customize the hell out of it. We create plugins specifically to meet the clients need. I would recommend to look at the theme download section in wordpress and take any you like and deconstruct it. Also try to learn laravel so you can become a better PHP developer.