I am looking to hire someone to turn a PSD into a WordPress theme. Is it better to have an underlying theme like Generate press and have the PSD converted to that, or to just start a theme from scratch?
In my experience it’s better to start with an established, well-reviewed, widely used, and well-supported foundation theme (Genesis is an example) that’s under ongoing development and customize a child theme based on that.
The reason being that, unlike 10-15 years ago, the security, performance, and ongoing development environment means it’s difficult to thoroughly “future proof” a from-scratch theme. (Not impossible, but the learning curve and domain knowledge threshold is now very high.)
As a support person for site owners who are no longer in touch with their original developers I still occasionally run into sites with custom themes that break on PHP 7.x, don’t have Customizer or even Admin Bar support, don’t implement now-common hooks, etc.
A base theme will handle all that, while you can focus your development efforts on meeting your clients’ design needs.
For a custom build, I’ll start with [underscores]), which handles all the initial setup stuff.
In my experience it’s better to start with an established, well-reviewed, widely used, and well-supported foundation theme (Genesis is an example) that’s under ongoing development and customize a child theme based on that.
The reason being that, unlike 10-15 years ago, the security, performance, and ongoing development environment means it’s difficult to thoroughly “future proof” a from-scratch theme. (Not impossible, but the learning curve and domain knowledge threshold is now very high.)
As a support person for site owners who are no longer in touch with their original developers I still occasionally run into sites with custom themes that break on PHP 7.x, don’t have Customizer or even Admin Bar support, don’t implement now-common hooks, etc.
A base theme will handle all that, while you can focus your development efforts on meeting your clients’ design needs.
For a custom build, I’ll start with [underscores]), which handles all the initial setup stuff.