Standard web design/development best practices apply to building any theme including custom WP themes. The checklist below discuss standard procedures before starting a custom WP theme (or any website):

  • Understand the main purpose of the site. Keep your site purpose as singular as possible and try to eliminate anything that does not support the main purpose of the site.
  • Identify who (you believe) the primary and secondary target audiences will be. If possible, create a few audience personas.
  • Find other existing sites serving a similar purpose. List what they do well, what they lack, and note how your site will differentiate itself from these others.
  • Review several WordPress site designs/themes (and plugins) and note how they are structured 1. How do they handle menus? Does the width expand 100% or is the width confined and centered on larger screens? How many columns are used? Do they offer search? a contact us form? What happens when the browser window is resized to cellphone width? Etc.
  • Note any features you want to incorporate in your site.
  • Sketch out roughly how the homepage and primary pages will appear on a widescreen. For a simple site, like a blog, this may be just one sketch, then sketch how they will look on a cellphone.
  • With sketches in hand build an initial, static, local, and responsive demo or prototype.

Your prototype should include at the very least, your homepage, a standard content page, and any primary pages needed to accomplish the purpose of the site (a form submission page or page for chart/table data, etc.).

If planning to use specific a plugin or feature, such as a calendar or drag and drop shopping cart, find a good demo of them to help you layout how they will look in your prototype. It makes sense to include any libraries or responsive frameworks you plan to use, like Foundation, Material Design or Bootstrap. Don’t get too tied down with details. Just get something static together that is reasonably acceptable for now. If something is slowing you down, use FPO (For Position Only) spacer images and Lorem Ipsum text for now. Keep in mind, most early decisions can be easily revised later.

Creating a prototype may seem unnecessary to some, but going through this process in advance will save time later. It will also provide an extremely useful reference during the theme building process.

Next, take your static site and post it to a staging server to view it on a desktop, laptop, iPad (landscape and portrait) and at least one cellphone. Make a list of any glaring issues. After addressing the issues, step away. Go get some coffee, or even come back the next day and review it again. Repeat this until you have a site that will reasonably impress your audience on the various devices.

The steps above apply to building any site. Once completed, you are in a better position to start building a custom WordPress theme.