Creating and Using a Child Theme
As much as I would have liked to say I created a Custom Theme from scratch, I decided to go with creating my first theme by creating a Child Theme based on one of the default WordPress theme.
I decided to go this route because I am a beginner in WordPress and I’m still trying to learn and understand this Content Management System. I based my Child Theme off of WordPress’ Twenty Seventeen theme.
Given a person with enough expertise and knowledge in WordPress Theme Design, the sort of situation where it would make more sense to create a Custom Theme as opposed to a Child Theme is when there is a web design that requires so much changes to an existing theme design that it just makes more sense to create a Custom Theme from scratch.
But in this instance, my situation as a beginner and also liking the default Twenty Seventeen theme for the most part, it made more sense for me to create a Child Theme and add a few changes to my liking, like changing the font color, background color, and text alignment of the heading in the style.css sheet.
I didn’t use any real template for creating my theme. From what I saw from my search on YouTube, I understand that there are WordPress plug-ins like Beaver Builder and using a basic theme like Astra that gives a basic layout of a page that I can build a Custom theme upon. That’s beyond my scope for now, but I do hope and intend on learning how to a create a Custom Theme from scratch in the near future. For me, WordPress’ Twenty Seventeen theme was like a template because I used it as my starting point to build a Child theme on top of.