Starting with a new theme – How to?

You’re right, it would be far more helpful to have a developer help you complete this project.

It’s hard to say why your plugins never had any updates, many different reasons.

When developing an existing site it is helpful to clone it either to your local computer (requires more advance knowledge) or clone it to a sub-domain on your existing hosting account (easier).

When you do pick a theme, you should setup child theme. Many themes come with one. Child theme ensures that changes made are not overwritten when you update parent theme. Child theme allows you to copy files from parent theme to modify. If WP sees a file like header.php in child theme directory it will use it, ignoring header.php in parent directory. If no file present in child theme directory, then it uses files from parent theme directory.

If you hire developer you should make sure they create child theme and do not edit files in parent theme directory.

You can check out marketplace like upwork.com where you can post a job and receive bids from developers. Either fixed price or hourly work.

Another similar marketplace is freelancer.com.

It’s hard to say how much this would cost because price varies depending who you hire and where they are located.

Hope that helps.

^V

Side note:

How long do you think an experienced developer would need to set me up with a personalized child theme? I’ve seen that the average hourly wage is around 50-60$US, so I can get a basic idea how much I’d have to pay.

That part is not a conversation for these forums. Any talk of payment will get this topic closed down per the forum welcome.

https://make.www.ads-software.com/support/handbook/forum-welcome/#do-not-offer-to-pay-for-help

This is a good topic but please stay away from that part here. ??

I suspect you know more about theme development than you give yourself credit for. Even so, getting professional assistance can be a good idea, especially if you need a fully functioning new theme in short order. I’m assuming you would find help that is able to start right away. While pros may work faster than you, waiting a month for them to even start would erase any time savings. A couple resources for getting help are jobs.wordpress.net and jetpack.pro.

ProjectArmySupport said “make sure they…do not edit files in parent theme.” Great advice. We should expect WP professionals would do so without prompting, but I’ve seen some perplexing, unsustainable work done by so called professionals. It’s good that you at least know something about what’s right or wrong so you can quickly see if you made the right choice or not.

If you are at all inclined to do the work yourself and have an interest in improving your coding skills, I would encourage you to do so if you have the time. I’ve no doubt it took you a long time to get to where you are at. You may be surprised how much faster it goes the second time around. I believe the best way to learn is by working on a real project. You could either start with a theme that’s very close to what you want and customize it to get exactly what you want, or start with a minimal base theme like underscores and take on the responsibility for the total look and feel yourself.

If you abhor unnecessary features and bloat, a starter theme is the way to go, but it will be more work. I would urge you to stay away from framework themes. The theme you get is delivered as a child of the framework and it’s not possible to create a child of a child. You want a child theme that is wholly your own.

The way WP is setup, it is extremely difficult to get page speed scores very close to 100. There are a few things that are simply unreasonable to fix. Like unnecessary CSS and JavaScript with above the fold content. Do everything reasonable to improve page speed, but don’t agonize over things that are very difficult to fix.

While it will take some effort to setup a localhost installation, I firmly believe it’s well worth the effort. I would stop coding all together before I would go back to developing on a hosted server. The advantages may sound weak at best, but one little advantage multiplied thousands of times becomes significant. Do it, you will not regret it.

It’s very helpful to place the domain name that will be the eventual address of your site in your local computer’s hosts file. You can then access the local copy with the proper domain and all internal references will have the correct domain from the very start. When you do migrate to a live server, nothing needs to be changed. (Typically one needs to do a massive search and replace of all localhost references) The drawback is you cannot then reach the live site with the same domain. You should be able to get to it through the URL intended for temporary use while waiting for the actual domain name to come through. But internal references will keep trying to go back to your local install, so the “temporary” URL doesn’t work very well. Better to use a different device that doesn’t have the hosts entry.

If you do decide to do your own coding, you are not working in isolation. If you do get stuck on something, help is only a forum question away ??

Thank you all so much for the great advice!

I didn’t know that frameworks use a child theme already.
I hope people state when it’s a child theme, not that I buy one and it turns out to be already a child theme. ??

Also very interesting insight about speed/performance x WordPress. I didn’t know that.
I guess I can be content with the kind of speed I managed to squeeze out of my installation then. ^^

Setting up a local machine sounds quite tricky.
But I suppose I would have to replace all links/references even if I used a subdomain instead of a local installation.

@jdembowski: Thank you for letting me know. It wasn’t my intention to talk about payment. That wasn’t the key point of my question. ??