I’ve been building websites for years, and like most people working with WordPress, I’ve used plenty of prebuilt themes and plugins along the way.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that approach. WordPress has a huge selection of tools available, and many of them work well. The problem I kept running into was that they didn’t always work the way I wanted them to.
A theme might look great but require workarounds to get the layout right. A plugin might provide one feature I needed but introduce several others I didn’t. Sometimes an update would change something unexpectedly, or a feature I had been using would end up behind a paid subscription.
None of these problems were necessarily dealbreakers on their own, but over time, managing the workarounds became frustrating.
When I decided to rebuild FlesherNET, I wanted to try a different approach.
Building What I Actually Needed
Rather than searching for another theme that came close to what I wanted, I decided to build my own.
I already had a pretty good idea of how I wanted the site to look and function, so developing a custom WordPress theme gave me the freedom to work toward that without constantly adapting someone else’s design.
I could decide how the pages were structured, what functionality belonged in the theme, and which features actually needed plugins.
That doesn’t mean I stopped using plugins altogether. There are plenty of situations where using an existing solution makes more sense than developing and maintaining something yourself. I just wanted to be more selective about what I added and why.
A Simpler Approach
One of the things I noticed during development was how much easier certain decisions became when I wasn’t working around the limitations of an existing theme.
If I wanted something positioned differently, I could change the layout directly. If a feature wasn’t necessary, I didn’t have to include it. And when something didn’t work correctly, I had a much better understanding of where to look because I had written the code myself.
The development process also went faster than I expected.
I wasn’t spending as much time searching for compatible plugins, overriding styles, or figuring out why a theme behaved a certain way. Instead, I could focus on building the functionality I actually wanted.
The result was a relatively lightweight site that performed well and was easier for me to maintain.
Of course, building your own theme also means taking responsibility for it. If something breaks, I have to figure out why. If WordPress changes something that affects my code, I have to address it.
For me, that’s a reasonable tradeoff.
Why I Enjoy Doing It Myself
I’ve always enjoyed understanding how things work, whether I’m dealing with software, computers, cars, or machinery.
Sometimes an existing solution does exactly what I need, and I’m happy to use it. Other times, I find myself wondering whether I could make something work better for my particular situation.
That’s usually when I start experimenting.
I don’t necessarily know everything involved when I begin a project. A lot of what I’ve learned over the years has come from researching unfamiliar problems, trying different approaches, and figuring out why something didn’t work the first time.
Building the FlesherNET theme was another opportunity to do that.
Where It Stands
I’m happy with how the site turned out, although I doubt I’ll ever consider it completely finished. I’ll continue making adjustments, adding features, and improving things as I find opportunities to do so.
The biggest benefit of developing the theme myself is that I now have a foundation I understand and can modify whenever I need to.
And for a website that’s intended to document my projects, share information, and provide resources for others, that flexibility is exactly what I wanted.
