I originally started out with a copy of twentytwelve. My thought was to modify the necessary items and make it my own. I worked on it for a about a day and noticed that I was changing a lot of HTML and PHP. I wasn’t sure I liked this as it was killing the widgets. I took a few days off.

Then, last Tuesday, I went to a Meetup of the FredWebTech group. The night’s presentation: building child themes in WordPress. How timely! I enjoyed the presentation and decided to scrap what I had already done and start over, this time only copying what I needed to from twentytwelve and overriding the original files with ones in my child them. It worked so well that I did it all this morning in about 3 hours.

The only HTML I changed was adding some custom stuff for the header to bring it inline with my site’s header and in the footer. I also added one tag to the sidebar files. The rest was all CSS updates. Adding an ID to the body tag made it easy to override the parent theme’s CSS.

Feel free to poke around. If you see anything amiss, please leave a comment on this post and I will fix it post-haste!.

After this morning’s work, I feel that WordPress themes are easier to work with than I anticipated. At least, building a child theme is.

Steps completed so far:

• MAMP is installed and working on my localhost
• WordPress is installed and working on my localhost
• A tutorial for Building a WordPress Theme from Scratch has been found.

Now, the real fun begins…