Is a multipurpose theme an alternative to modifying or creating a theme from scratch?

Question

Some experience using Wordpress, but not much experience developing with Wordpress. In two months, I will be tasked with programming a Wordpress website for a church. They are currently developing their "look and feel", and when done I am supposed to "program it in". I am not sure how much they understand about how Wordpress works, however.

In the past few days I have been acquainting myself with HTML, CSS, MYSQL, PHP, and two books on Wordpress Theme development in case I have to modify a theme for them. In the meantime, I advised them to go on the Internet and google "Wordpress Theme church" to see if there would be something that would suit their needs that maybe I could modify slightly if need be.

I am not keen on doing extra programming if I can help it, because I have concerns with the church being able to debug and maintain the website if I should have to leave prematurely for some reason. I also have concerns about them being able to pick a theme from the Internet altogether.

Tonight, however, I was beginning to watch a tutorial on Wordpress, and I noticed an advertisement for a multipurpose theme that claimed it was the easiest way to build a website, but without hardly any coding. That sounded good to me, but I am looking for an opinion if multipurpose themes are flexible enough that a person wouldn't need to search for a specialized theme to modify or build one from scratch? What would be the advantages and disadvantages of the different approaches?

Answer 1

In my opinion, multi-purpose themes are the worst thing you can use, especially if you have specific goals in mind. Whatever theme you choose, you can use it without any code changes, and in the same time, if you run into problems with multi-purpose theme and need to make changes to the code, you will need a lot more time to do it then with simpler niche themes.

If you need church theme, there are specialized themes and even theme shops dedicated to church themes. If you find the right theme, you will not need to make any code changes. And, even if you need to do it, the simpler theme is simpler to modify.

My advice: when you have a specific goal in mind, stay away from multipurpose themes. And stay away from any shop claiming that their theme is 'easiest' to build a website with.