Reasons my clients want me to develop a custom theme for every wordpress website

In my first few years in web development, I worked on custom web application development using PHP MVC frameworks, and ASP.NET used to ignore WordPress as it wasn’t considered real programming work. With my limited knowledge about its user base, I thought people are happy with those rich premium themes they buy from Theme forest or other similar marketplaces.

One day a very good friend came to me with a purchased premium theme and wanted my help to create a website using that, and that was my first hand experience with so-called premium themes. Even though front end in demo was cool, I realized it was really very hard to find customization options and even harder to create a theme that they show in their demo, it seemed almost impossible. I thought something was not good with the theme developer and moved on.

After a while, I was working on a project for software management company based In Texas. One day their project manager, who was working with me, told me that they were working on some websites too. She asked if I can help her with some “small stuffs”. I checked what she wanted and that was really simple stuff in normal case so I agreed. Later I had to spend hours and hours to make those changes with their Premium Theme. When I was explaining here how simple that work should have been, she asked me if I can develop a custom theme for her.

I made that WordPress theme and it’s admin. She was happy with my front end work and she was amazed to see how easy the admin panel of that site was. We did few more website themes after that assignment. The main reason she started giving me every website for custom theme development was :

• That they never had to spend time to manage content. Admin was so easy that even semi-technical end users could change content.
• Admin was super minimal, no fancy option that they were ever going to use. This made admin management less confusing.
• Theme had limited php files that made code level changes easier than ever.
• Website load time improved so much
• New feature requirements were easy to develop and integrate.
• Lesser use of plugins made our themes hack proof as we know plugins can be vulnerable if not written properly.