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I just want to know whether I should roll my own theme from scratch or I should customize an existing one like twenty twelve. Reason I ask is I wanted to know whether there are any best practises I may be missing if may be missing from these themes ir I roll my own.

Also I find that there is a lot of bloat even for a theme as simple as twenty twelve and hence ind myself removing a lot of it as I'm building my theme. The site I am currently building is www.laminsanneh.com

Thanks in nadvance

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    There is no right or wrong answer here. Whether to build your own custom theme or customize an existing theme depends on your time available, skill level, interest, purpose, etc.
    – Rachel Baker
    Commented Feb 1, 2013 at 14:35

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You might look into the concept of using child themes to roll your own theme. A framework like Genesis comes out with regular updates and has a starter theme that can be quickly built upon.

I would take the time to roll your own so that you can know the ins and outs of your own website. If you tweak an existing theme that has bloat you may have things break later and find that fixing issues is more of a headache.

There are different frameworks and starter themes out there that will be better to start with than Twenty-Twelve.

Here is one example: http://html5blank.com/

There are also responsive ones available like this: http://themefortress.com/reverie/

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Like Jordan says, child themes is definitely an option to consider.

An important issue is that a modern site design needs to be "responsive" in order to appear well for the 20% of visitors coming from mobiles, tablets, and other very small viewports. A good theme (I've been using bones recently) will provide a lot of scaffolding to help with the process of setting up a responsive design.

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