- Start with a theme that’s as close as possible to what you want, but think more about structure and layout than graphics and colors
- Alternative method: start with one of the very simple, well-documented themes, and build your HTML and CSS around that basic structure
- Before you edit any file, make a back-up copy. (You can just copy and paste it to a text document, and replace your edited copy with your saved copy at any time.
- Print out and annotate changes you’re making
- One step at a time! Make a single change, save, check, revert if necessary.
- You don’t have to understand much to make a simple change, you just need to find a sample of the code change you need, and make it carefully without backing over anything on the way in or out.
- Find another theme that has some feature that you want, and check the code
- If you don’t understand it, don’t remove it.
- Copy and paste
- Comment your code. Comments are snippets of code or text that only display in the file, and not on the page people see in the browser. You can use them to leave notes, or to turn off code that you’re not using.
HTML comments look like this:
<!—this is the comment –>