I’ve been developing websites for customers for 3 years now and actually building them myself for the past 6 months. After years of trying out different web development platforms; everything from raw html, to FrontPage, to DreamWeaver, and various PHP and online development programs, I’ve decided on WordPress as my platform of choice. With it’s wide range of templates and plugins and the active community of WordPress developers who’ve created code and tutorials, WordPress can do almost everything that I need to do in a website.
With that in mind, here are the tools that I use everyday when building websites.
The Builder Theme from iThemes
I literally use Builder for 90% of the websites that I create. Builder offers:
- Completely customizable layouts
- The Style Manager, which allows you to edit CSS on the fly
- 38 child themes on which to base the look of your site.
- Built-in SEO options
Some of my favorites child themes are:
- Americana – Designed for use on political campaign websites, I used this on a site that I created for my grandfather’s memoirs. My grandfather was a soldier during WWII and I thought the patriotic fonts and feel bring that out.
- Ionic and it’s sub-styles Ionic Green and Ionic Sky – Sleek and stylish, I really like the layout of posts on the homepage and the utilization of Featured Images. One of the most versatile themes, I’ve used this on a variety of sites, such as the Fashion Industry Association Newsletter, Manipulate Men: a site for women, and an auto shop equipment dealer.
- Scooter – A fun theme that uses the Google web font Lobster to great effect. It’s a fairly new style and I’m using it for a still-in-development pinup site.
Among the non-Builder theme, I really like Magazine Basic from Themes by Bavotasan. I use a no-frills basic install for an article website that I put together. I was looking for something simple that would allow me to display my most recent posts in an article/magazine format. It actually has a fairly powerful back-end editor that allows you to control things like page width, headers, footers, sidebars and SEO options. This version doesn’t have the versatility of Builder, but you don’t always need that much complexity. If you’re looking for more options, they offer upgraded versions: Magazine Flow and Magazine Premium.