May 19, 2025
Thanks to an old tutorial, I finally made a WordPress site from scratch
Back in the day — we’re talking about 20 years ago — when I was exploring CMS’s, the obvious choice, then as now, was WordPress.
That wasn’t the choice I made, though, because I couldn’t figure out how to create a WordPress site from scratch. The common advice, even from a book I bought, was to install a theme and tweak it. Making your own design was apparently too difficult.
I never really gave up, though, which is why I bookmarked a blog post, also many years ago, with this promising title: Developing a Wordpress Theme from Scratch. It’s written by Tania Rascia, who has a digital garden well worth exploring.
Every once in a while I would see that bookmark and think about reading the article, but never had the time or incentive. Until now.
With working life behind me, I have time. And with the possibility of one of my old WordPress sites being revived, I have incentive. The site was using a tweaked third-party theme that I was never really happy with. I need to have complete control over a design.
Tania’s tutorial works by starting you off with a what she calls a template. But this could be pretty much any HTML-and-CSS design you can dream up. You take this design and chop it up into all the PHP pages that make WordPress what it is.
For me it made sense, and I was able to get the site looking exactly the way I wanted, with no compromises. I even made my own plug-in.