Is Using WordPress Themes Frameworks Cheating at Web Design?

I read a very inter­est­ing arti­cle over the week­end titled “Are WordPress Themes Cheating in Web Design?” by James Dalman. That arti­cle itself was inspired by an older one titled “Confessions of a Template Whore” by Sabrina Dent which is equally interesting.

The point of this post is not to rehash the same ideas as these two arti­cles. I agree with both authors that, using themes is quite OK in many cases, espe­cially for non-​designers who want to get blogs and even sim­ple sites up and still get at least a pro­fes­sional “look”, even if we all know that design goes a lot deeper than mere dec­o­ra­tion and sur­face skinning.

A good look­ing and func­tional free theme like the one I used when I moved this site to WordPress won’t win any­one any orig­i­nal­ity awards, but it will get the job done for a lot of peo­ple and won’t turn away vis­i­tors because the site looks like crap or is com­pletely unusable.

But beyond pre-​made themes that you just plug into a site and tweak a lit­tle, there is whole other cat­e­gory of themes called “Premium Themes” or theme frame­works. This site’s evolv­ing design is now based on one called Thesis and I’ll be redo­ing my com­pany blog as well as Isabelle’s entire Web site using another called Headway (btw, both are affil­i­ate links because I believe in these prod­ucts very strongly). I talked about Thesis and theme frame­works in this recent post.

Basically, what theme frame­works do is enable you to eas­ily (or rel­a­tively eas­ily) “skin” your blog or site using your own design with lit­tle or no cod­ing… and that is what I wanted to touch on here.

A major Shift

For me, start­ing to use WordPress has been a mind shift in itself, for a few rea­sons. But I always fig­ured I would at least even­tu­ally build my own theme for it… from scratch… and I fig­ured I would build blogs with it and lit­tle else. But that’s until I dis­cov­ered the true power of the plat­form. The mind shift was com­plete once I dis­cov­ered Thesis andHeadway and the world of theme frame­works… and my imag­i­na­tion started racing!

As many of you know, I have been design­ing and build­ing Web sites for a long time now, so I know how to code and do so in an effi­cient man­ner. I’ve never used code exported from Fireworks (the appli­ca­tion I design all of my sites with) because it never was good enough for me. Without call­ing myself a purist, I’ve always prided myself in the qual­ity of my HTML and CSS and I’ve worked hard at keep­ing up with cur­rent tech­niques. So you can imag­ine my reluc­tance to let go of most of my con­trol using WordPress and a theme frame­work to build not only a blog, but entire Web sites!

But I plan to do just that for not only Isabelle’s site, but my biggest Web site project to date if I get it (I’m send­ing my bid in on Friday) as well as any suit­able future projects.

What changed my mind? Quite frankly, I’m tired of the tedium and rep­e­ti­tion. Using WordPress and a good theme frame­work means that a lot of a site’s infra­struc­ture is already done for me, and done solidly too. Like James Dalman said in his article:

• It takes a lot of energy and time to cre­ate some­thing from nothing,
• free­lancers are lim­ited by time,
• and a busi­ness’ pri­mary goal (free­lance or oth­er­wise) is to be profitable

These are just as applic­a­ble to cod­ing a site as they are to design­ing it. If I can get more projects done faster it will mean a bet­ter cash flow for me and sig­nif­i­cant sav­ings for my clients. Plus it will mean I will con­cen­trate more on the parts I enjoy (strat­egy, design, UX) and less on the tedium of cod­ing the same kind of func­tion­al­ity again and again.

This is not for every project but when it is applic­a­ble, it will be a win-​win for every­one IMO.

What do you think?