Themes: buy, hack, or build your own.

what's your preference and why

[lorax]

Having spent a 20+ months working with Thesis and Revolution themes, I've been tearing them apart and not feeling like I could actually build my own.

I'm not really enthralled at the prospect - nor do I really have the time - but there are certain advantages to building my own - like optimizing the code to be light and effective SEOwise. And there are certain advantages to buying one or hacking one - less time to implementation.

What's your preference?

[htmlbasictutor]

Build my own based on the old Default theme. Why? Because:

a ) HTML 5 is not a standard yet and it is a ways away before it will be an official standard.

b ) The background coding is laid out more SE friendly than the TwentyTen one.

[tangor]

Having done this kind of thing for 20+ years, I build my own (stealing new ideas from time to time, of course--though those are few and far between) and that's because I have already built a formidable kit of html code/themes. These days the eye candy on the web are only variations of existing themes. After all, there's a basic functionality that is necessary for it to be HTML (any version) or it becomes JS ASP NET or other...

[spadilla]

We have evolved from themes, to customizing themes to just designing and coding themes ourselves. We recently realized that designing and coding custom themes actually saves time over customizing pre-fab themes. Personally, I won't go back to tweaking themes.