If you have the money to spend on customization I say go for it but if you are getting a loan or using up your savings or chequing account then you are nuts to have it customized.

Serena Carcasole´s last blog post…Article Marketing

I heard from someone in a position to know that even Dan Kennedy who was charging $80K to write a single sales letter, has gotten to the point where he’s just rewriting his own letters for every new client.

Louis Burns´s last blog post…Conference and Next Model

Real design also involves making choices based on the fuller needs of the client. As you pointed out, a lot of that can be done by figuring out which template to start from. A good designer can work from a template and do it right. The problem isn’t templates, it’s lack of design sense.

Joshua Clanton´s last blog post…Unprofessionalism #1: Blog Dis-Integration

Don’t regret it, as learned a lot about Wordpress customization, but guess I’m used to doing that.

Is the main reason why am looking at a new theme though.

And yes, am doing up a sketch of what would be the ideal theme, so can then compare against what is on the market.

I’m curious, though – why would you need/want to do so much tweaking? It seems that you have a Chevvy in your head but you keep looking at Fords, thinking, “Damn. I want a Chevvy.” In short, if you’re always looking at the *wrong* themes and not dismissing them quickly (as Alex did), then you’re wasting time.

Or seeking perfection

@ Graham – Yes, yes we were. And I’m so sick of people coming over with their snotty, uninformed comments about white on black that I couldn’t help but leap right out of context.

I mean, really, people. Would you walk up to someone on the street and say, “Dude. I fucking hate your coat, it’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen, and I’m never looking at you again.”

/rant. Thanks for listening.

Back to the theme versus custom…

To be frankly honest, the price difference I saw at one site was $900 for theme template and over $3,000 for custom. ALL OVER this woman’s site, it was written, “Get custom because otherwise, your business will fail.”

I thought that was such bullshit and a huge ripoff.

My main issue is that after so much tweaking, the theme you end up with is very much custom, and it becomes really hard to evaluate future theme upgrades, cause you’re depending so much on your own unique tweaks.

I know personally, I think I need a new theme. But there doesn’t seem to really be a theme out there that has ~everything~ I want, so it’s a difficult process of trying to choose the closest and visualizing how it would look after a week’s worth of tweaking.

Maybe I should make a dummy site to play around on and try to get a new theme up and running to a superior level of functionality.

Choosing the right theme, however, can be very time consuming. I remember going through a zillion of them before deciding on the one I picked. I even looked at the code of many of them.

One thing that I really liked about the theme the PenMen suggested was it’s ease of understanding in the coding. Things are explained, they’re laid out clearly, and making tweaks and changes is more or less straightforward.

This was especially important since I planned on doing tweaks myself and didn’t know much about theme design and php.

So, what was my goal then and how did my final decision serve it?

Goal: to find an inexpensive or free theme that I would pay to get customized then tweak myself afterwards.

Having that clearly in my head meant that I could dismiss a multitude of themes in moments. Made life much easier.

Alex Fayle | Someday Syndrome´s last blog post…Why Do We Choose to Be Unhappy?

My $.02
Dave

Dave C´s last blog post…Joomla 1.5.8 Released takes care of some bugs

~Graham

Graham Strong´s last blog post…The Art of Perception V: How Does Apple Do It?

We are *USED* to seeing black on white. That doesn’t mean white on black is less readable.