Finally, I got to upload my own custom-built WordPress theme for my own website. Would you believe that? I have created countless WordPress websites with “hand-crafted” themes, yet – I have not made one for myself. Until now. 😀
This mini-project started when I heard about Bootstrap Studio. I bought the lifetime subscription to the app because I am a big fan of Bootstrap, and I was in love with the interface. Kudos to the guys who built it. 🙂
So I started building the homepage while viewing the Youtube tutorial on how to build a site using bootstrapstudio. It was supposed to be just a test/tinkering but it went for a few hours more than expected. Parallax there, Rows/Columns/Offset/Icons …. later, something came up.
I thought, well, why not use this to build a WordPress theme for myself. So it is a half-one page / half-blog site. You would see some parts are happy accidents. Haha.
This proves once again that custom WordPress theme sites are straightforward to build. Yes it takes a lot of time, however it gives you more control of your site.
A quick list of how I did this site
- Created the initial HTML that looks like a one-page site in Bootstrap Studio
- Exported and built a WordPress theme out-of-nothing! (Is it right to start from scratch or use a framework? Let’s discuss that on another post)
- Tidied up the theme on local machine via MAMP/Dreamweaver. Editing is now moved to Dreamweaver
- Setup a WordPress site in my existing 1and1 hosting (You could also do the FTP+Create MySQL db route)
- Zipped the local theme and uploaded it from Dashboard > Appearance > Themes
- Tweaked it some more. The “Thoughts” category was not part of the plan. Until I needed a place to write this Welcome post.
That’s it!
There is still a lot to do. Analytics, Contact Form7, and maybe other optimizations… SEO…
For now, I am just happy I got this one up!
If you have questions on my setup and on how to build HTML/CSS/Wordpress sites.. Let me know via the comments.