WordPress – Mistake # 1 – Skip the child theme

Selecting a theme is sooo easy and don’t they look great? Being a more functionally focused kind of guy,  having a site styled by someone with taste was a big plus. It works AND it looks good.

The trouble for me began when I needed to insert some blocks of codes at specific points. What a pain! I hadn’t designed the site and being a newbie to WordPress I was often baffled as to where to insert the desired code. Maybe this situation contributed to the decision to ignore the advice to use a child theme? Ouch, big mistake.

I must of spent hours sorting through the various segments of the template my wife had selected to determine where to place code and how to position it just right to achieve the desired result.

All for naught when the theme was updated a few weeks later.

I had a local copy of the site but for that to help I had to compare files. In the end I bit the bullet, built the child theme and implemented the required code once again. It has now survived multiple theme updates and the latest WordPress update. Lesson learnt! Child themes now considered mandatory.