dear forum members,
being tired tweaking ready-made wordpress themes, I want to learn how to develop my own wordpress-based theme/website.
I have heard that bootstrap has easy to learn curve. Knowing myself, I need to start with something light to avoid being discourage and stop my journey.
Or maybe, it’s not a good idea, and I should better concentrate myself on CSS and Javascript, and customise the latest open theme like Underscore for my needs.
Please, advice.
Thank you!
Alfiya
You should absolutely be 100% comfortable with CSS and HTML before diving into Frontend Frameworks. Fundamentally there’s really not much difference in using a Frontend Framework like Foundation or Bootstrap with themes as there is to using a Wordpress theme. You should be able to customize it and modify it comfortably. You can do this by strictly overriding styles through CSS or by one of the preprocessors like LESS or SASS.
Knowing SASS would be the best, but they are very similar. Bootstrap is written in LESS but has a SASS port, Foundation is built in SASS and most other smaller frameworks are as well. SASS is leading the pack and leaving LESS behind.
Javascript you could probably skip, though it’s definitely something good to know.
That said… if you can’t tell I’m a Foundation fan. 
It just feels like higher quality and the code is much easier to read.
thank you. What bothers me the most about Bootsrap is the identical look of majority of the websites using this framework. In the beginning I was ok with this but now it irritates me like hell: same menu, same slider, same footer, parallax sections, cold accordion sections…
On another hand, I’m not 100% comfortable with CSS and HTML, I’m still in the learning process… And Bootstrap has large community, so more chances to stumble into solution when I stuck. Hmmm…
A person really needs to know HTML/CSS before learning how to use SASS or LESS, a preprocessor is just a tool to make CSS easier to write and some of the conventions in SASS is a little bit unorthodox. SASS and LESS are great for big projects where more than one person is working on a project.
regardless of being bootstrap, foundation or a wordpress theme. they key to styling it to your satisfaction is an at least good understanding of css/html/html5 and a little bit of js and/or jquery would be nice.
The emphasis being on the css and htmls.
bootstrap, for example doesn’t have to have that “boostrap” look. you can change the css to style it as you want.
the more you learn the easier it’ll become. The biggest part is perseverance if you are really into this, because it can certainly get frustrating at times.
D