Build your own theme instead of buying one

Buying a theme used to be obviously correct. You were not buying design, you were buying the thousand hours of work you could not do yourself. That calculation has changed.

What you get with a purchased theme is somebody else’s assumptions, a settings panel that covers eighty percent of what you want, and a permanent fight with the last twenty. What you get when you build is exactly what you asked for and nothing you did not.

The migration is not a rip-and-replace, which is the part that scares people off. Start a child theme, rebuild one template, and that template wins. The parent keeps running everything else. Repeat until the parent is doing nothing, then flip the switch and notice that nothing broke — because nothing changed on that final day except which file was in charge.

This site is the proof, incidentally. It is a custom theme, no framework and no builder, built entirely this way.