CHAPTER 4 • WordPress Theme Essentials 111
THE USABILITY FACTOR
My main gripe with custom fields is that they look so messy. Just look at that Custom Fields
box in the WordPress admin; it isn’t at all as user-friendly as the rest of the interface. Just the
key and value nomenclature, and then the whole design of the box. . . No, it just isn’t some-
thing I’d trust a client with.
This is the most serious issue with custom fields, in my view. After all, when you’ve used them
once, it is easy enough to pick the key you need and copy and paste the image you want in the
value field, for example. But although that may not seem daunting to you, a client may feel
different.
This is something you need to keep in mind when doing work for clients. Is it feasible to
assume that the person(s) updating the site can handle custom fields? The most common
usage of custom fields is, after all, headline images and things such as that, and they almost
always involve finding a URL to the image and copying and pasting it to the value field of the
appropriate key. Can the client handle that?
Custom fields are great, but until they are presented in a more user-friendly way, they are
limited to the more web-savvy crowd, which isn’t afraid to do some manual inputting. You
probably fall into that category, but whether your clients (or partners, collaborators, or
whoever) do is up to you to decide. If not, you are probably better off finding another solu-
tion. Luckily, there are a few plugins that solve this (which you’ll get to later in the book), or
you can create more stylized meta boxes yourself.
DEVELOPING A STARTER THEME
If you’re a theme designer, or just an aspiring one, and you want to develop WordPress-based
sites, you really need a basic starter theme. Here’s why:
◾ It is a time-saver. Every time you need to start a new WordPress project, you have a basic
and easy-to-edit/alter/break theme to begin with.
◾ It is familiar. When you’ve spent hours and hours hacking a theme, possibly for several
different projects, you’ll feel right at home when going at it again and again.
◾ It is easy to keep up to date. If you keep your starter theme up to date, you won’t have to
struggle with new functionality all the time: Just update once, and there you have it.
◾ It may make client updates easier. Assuming that you’re building your sites as child
themes standing on your starter theme’s shoulders, updating client sites with new
functionality shouldn’t be a problem.As you will discover in Chapter 5, “The Child Theme Concept,” child themes are your friends.
If you set up a solid starter theme that you build your WordPress sites on, you’ll make
everything easier on yourself.
You can use any theme as your own basic starter theme to build upon, whether you do this by
hacking the theme directly to fit your needs or by applying the child theme concept to it.
There are lots of free themes to use in just about any way you like, for personal sites or as a