Well I have been making progress on refocusing my business activities and preparing for my relaunch over the last couple of months. This has included more work on the Grit & Oyster website. I’ve just completed a major phase of developing the theme and most of the component parts are now there. This has taken a little longer than I had planned because I decided to step back before going forward.

I decided that I wanted to create a ‘template’ or ‘starter’ theme to act as a reliable code base for future development. Essentially this is a WordPress template which works and has all the necessary code and files, but has a limited amount of design and styling applied to it. This is so you can use it as a platform to build other themes on.

I did look at a range of the existing ‘starter’ themes and templates that are available. I had a good look at the code of some of the more popular ones. But while they provided inspiration, and in some cases some useful bits of code, I decided I wanted to create one for myself. Partly this was simply for the challenge, but it was also because I felt that if I was going to use it to build websites for clients I really needed to know and understand the code thoroughly — and the best way to do that is to write it yourself.

What I’ve ended up with I’ve called “Oystershell” and while not yet perfect it is finished enough to be used in anger. I am rather pleased with some of the features:

• It has the option of a responsive or fixed width layout
• The status, aside and quote post formats are included
• It has a number of customisable functions that will make theme development a lot easier
• I’ve included a range of action hooks that I can make use of in custom plugins
• I also think the CSS style sheet provides a pretty comprehensive base covering all the common and a lot of the not so common page elements

The theme for the Grit & Oyster website is now a child theme of the Oystershell starter theme. Creating that child theme was a good test of using it as base for theme development. The main additions were the colour scheme, the use of web fonts, and getting the particular responsive layout I wanted. There was also some tweaks to the post formats and the addition of special features for the website home page.

I’m aware that what I have ended up with is not the most stunning piece of graphic design – but then it wasn’t really intended to be. My objective was to come up with a technically solid implementation of a WordPress theme that uses standard compliant code. I wanted to avoid the use of JavaScript where possible, preferring intelligent use of CSS, and to try out techniques of responsive design. All of that I believe I have achieved.

Now to concentrate on some actual content!