Drawbacks to using an already built theme

The drawback to using an already built theme is that it may not save you as much time as you would hope for. You may realize, even with the new header text and graphic, several other sites may have downloaded and/or purchased it for themselves and you don't stand apart enough.

Perhaps your site needs a special third-party plugin for a specific type of content; it might not look quite right without a lot of tweaking. And while we're discussing tweaking, I find that every CSS designer is different and sets up their theme's template files and stylesheets accordingly. While it makes perfect sense to them, it can be confusing and time consuming to work through.

Your approach may have started out as simplicity, but then, for one reason or another, you find yourself having to dig deeper and deeper through the theme and pretty soon it doesn't feel like quick tweaking anymore. Sometimes you realize—for simplicity's sake (no pun intended)—it would have been a whole lot quicker to start from scratch.

Before trying to cut corners with a preexisting theme, make sure your project really is as simple as it claims to be. Once you find a theme, check that you are allowed to tweak and customize it (such as an open source or Creative Commons license or royalty free purchase from a template site), and that you have a look at the stylesheet and template files. Make sure the theme's assets seem logical and make sense to you.

Using theme frameworks

Theme frameworks are wonderful in that they provide the core functionality of a theme, already started for you. The idea is they let you create child themes off the main theme, which you can then easily style to your liking.

They're particularly useful to designers who are short on time, very good with CSS, and don't want to deal with the learning curve of having to understand WordPress' template tags, hooks, and template page hierarchy.

The whole point of this book is to introduce you to the above concepts and introduce you to the basics of WordPress theme features so that you can create elegant comprehensive themes from scratch. You can then see how getting a little creative will enable you to develop any kind of site you can imagine with WordPress. You'll also be able to better take advantage of a theme framework, as you'll understand what the framework is accomplishing for you "under the hood" , and you would also be able to better customize the framework if you'd like to.

For many frameworks, there is still some amount of learning curve to getting up and running with them. But less of it will deal directly with futzing with PHP code to get WordPress to do what you want.

I'd encourage you to take a look at development with a framework and compare it to development from scratch. Having the skills this book provides you with under your belt will only help, even if you choose to go with a framework to save time.