Key takeaways
- A well-built site has a clear structure of pages and topics, loads fast, works on phones, covers the accessibility basics and runs on clean, standard WordPress.
- Many sites look finished but are fragile underneath: heavy themes, layered page builders and plugins doing overlapping jobs.
- This rule is why I make my own themes, and why I prefer structured, repeatable work to improvisation.
The second rule is about what you cannot see. A website can look finished on the home page and still be a mess underneath: slow, fragile, hard to change and confusing to search engines. I have opened enough of those sites to know that the surface tells you very little.
What I mean by well built
When I say a site is well built, I mean five things:
- A clear structure. Pages and topics are organised so that people and machines can tell what the site is about and how its parts relate.
- Fast pages. Nothing loads that the page does not need.
- It works on phones. The layout adapts properly, and buttons and text are usable on a small screen.
- The accessibility basics. Proper headings, alternative text for images and readable contrast.
- Clean, standard WordPress underneath. No pile of overlapping plugins, no exotic setup only one person understands.
None of these is glamorous. All of them decide whether a site is pleasant to use and easy to change five years from now.
Why this led me to make themes
For a long time I built client sites on the same few popular themes, like almost everyone. And for almost every site, I spent hours removing what I did not need and adding what I did. Eventually it made more sense to build themes designed for specific kinds of sites from the start. The articles below explain how that happened.
The articles in this section
Astra, Kadence and Blocksy Are Everywhere. None Is Built for a Blog and a SaaS Together explains what I kept finding when I opened other people’s sites, and the gap I saw in what was available.
I Was Customizing Every WordPress Theme I Used Anyway is about the hours I spent customising popular themes for each client, and why I stopped.
Is Vibe Coding Bad? Why I Don’t Improvise Websites sets out why I prefer a repeatable, structured way of building sites to improvising them, with or without AI.
Why My Themes Are Named After Architecture tells where the names come from, and why each one describes the kind of site it is made for.