I’ve been a front-end developer for more than a few years but until recently only occasionally worked a little with WordPress. Lately my interest in WP has grown.
WordPress is used in many ways, sometimes integrating pre-existing content, sometimes living alongside it, or in a new site where all the site content originates from within WP. Each of these projects involved a different such process. From most recent to oldest:
1. This one. I consciously chose to set up WP on OTL in a somewhat peculiar way; it would be more natural to simply add the extant content of OTL into WP but since the WP install was an afterthought I challenged myself to set up WP and integrate the OTL style (which, granted, is pretty minimalistic, but the process is the process) despite having substantially different markup (i.e., html structure). The point of departure for this exercise was a ‘blank slate’ theme, one with absolutely zero css beyond a reset. Provided a new design, I would sooner take this approach again than attempt to refine a turnkey theme. But again, every WP site has different needs.
2. Finchurst Dental
This was a complete rebuild of an existing site which had already a non-trivial quantity of content, all of which was incorporated into WordPress as static Pages. The design is clearly minimalistic, simple & clean; its point of departure was a WP theme merged with a Foundation front-end framework. The blog’s dynamic content is configured to accommodate case studies and a series of dental education Posts, most of which feature (or will feature) accompanying videos.
3. Rhona.com
This site is somewhat dated, and as far as I can tell it doesn’t get a lot of input or attention from its owner anymore. It involved applying an existing design (CSS) with elements of an off-the-shelf design.
In context of 10+ years experience developing, among other things, enterprise web sites and front-ends for several ecommerce and social media platforms, so far WP, with years of documentation and information available, has been pretty smooth sailing. I look forward to greater challenges in customizing WP sites.