Themes

WordPress has always been the tool I trust for putting things on the internet. It’s yours in a way that other platforms never are.

The thing about WordPress is that everything depends on the theme. It’s not just window dressing—it’s the actual structure of how your ideas get presented. Pick wrong and you’re fighting it constantly. Pick right and you barely think about it.

I spent a lot of time looking at WordPress themes in the early days. I was young enough to care about every detail, to think that the perfect theme could make everything feel right. I even built one myself—Sash—because I wanted something that didn’t assume it knew what you needed. Just space, just layout, nothing else. It was too bare for most people, probably still is.

But I learned what I was looking for in a theme from trying all those others. The ones that mattered were never the most feature-packed. They were the ones that understood restraint. Clean typography. Room to breathe. A structure you could actually modify without getting lost in nested settings and PHP you didn’t understand.

Some designers got it. You could tell by looking. Not just because their theme looked nice, but because you could feel the thinking behind it—the decisions about what to include and what to leave out. That clarity matters more than any feature list.

Most people never care about any of this. They find a theme that’s close enough and stop looking. That’s fine. But if you actually want your website to feel like it’s yours, you need a designer who understands the difference between giving people everything and giving them what actually matters.

I haven’t thought about WordPress themes in years. But there was something about that search—about wanting the tool to disappear so your ideas could shine through—that still feels important.