How I designed and coded my website in 24 hours
I thought I’d write a little post about how I actually managed to sit down in front of my new 24″ monitor, boot up Photoshop and design my site in a little over 24 hours. And by 24 hours, I don’t mean 24 hours of straight working, cause that would just be silly to work that long. The effective work hours is probably about half of that, since I had to eat, sleep and get my daily fix of The Office US in as well 
So how did I go about designing and coding a fully fledged WordPress theme in that short amount of time? Simple.
I cheated.
Yep that’s right… I consider it cheating, because I didn’t code my site from scratch, but instead used Over Easy, my latest contribution to the ever growing WooThemes theme collection. I finished making Over Easy a few weeks ago, and I liked the simple layout I had created in that theme. The only big difference between my new website and Over Easy is the front page, which took me the longest to code. But as you can see from the blog page, the layout is pretty similar, although I have changed the sidebar and the list styling.
This should be good proof of the usability of a standard WooThemes theme, and as you can see from our showcase, there are quite a large number of web designers doing the same as me; cutting corners. So is this kind of “cheating” a bad thing, or is this becoming the norm for designers wanting to save production time and increase profit from their clients? Let me know what you think by posting a comment!
Nov 9, 2008
I always like this when I got a layout almost similar with my past layout.
Some designers even create a pre-coded theme then they use it when they need
Nov 9, 2008
I don’t think it’s cheating as such. But largely because you created the theme you used as a starting point. From this perspective, it’s very similar to just using a self-made framework and I think we can agree that there’s nothing wrong with that.
There’s a fine line between what’s cheating and what’s not. If the starting product is your own, I think it’s fine. If the starting product isn’t yours but was made for the purpose of customization such as theme frameworks then I think that’s OK too. Where it becomes not so fine is the area in between – Those projects not created by yourself and ones not created for others to customize – That one, I would class as cheating. And possibly theft!
Nice job on the redesign too by the way.
Nov 10, 2008
Whatever gets the job done;-)
I recently used a WooTheme for a client, to recreate the clients existing design. Sounds crazy, but the WooTheme included the structure I was looking for.
Nov 10, 2008
You could’ve fooled me… I knew the layout and style looked similar to Over Easy, but I didn’t think you really used it, since that is just your signature style!
That said – it is definitely not cheating, considering that this is the main reason we’re in business at WooThemes: we sell theme frameworks to customers.
Dec 19, 2008
Cheating? No… I would call that common sense
Dec 22, 2008
[...] Finally redesigned my old portfolio by using Over Easy as the foundation. [...]
Jan 26, 2009
Cheating?? Not at all! Actually this makes you a great artist as Picasso said, “bad artists copy… great artists steal!.”
Nice work Jepson. I was googling for a nice wordpress theme and guess what? I found ‘Over Easy’. It is really an awesome theme. Keep it up Jepson.
Feb 14, 2009
Knowledge is power and also a cost saving tool for the future. Read my sig for more info on getting faster more efficient and targetted search results with one simple step.