So I decided to bite the bullet and built this site using the Underscores wordpress base theme. I highly recomend you download it and install so you can see just how basic it really is!
It had been a while since I had used wordpress so I wanted to use as much if it’s inbuilt goodness as possible. I’m only using one plugin on the entire site and that’s the Advanced Custom Fields plugin. The reason for this was that if in the future I want to change the theme I will still have all of my custom fields available to me, which as I’m sure you know is also considered best practice!
I was pleasantly surprised with how much is included in the WordPress core now and decided to code everything else into page templates. The menu was created using Superfish.js with Sticky.js and as you can see I have used Masonry and Isotope in various ways to pull posts from specific categories within specific page templates:
I don’t know how long the register and enqueue functions have been around but having a conditional enqueue has helped out massively for only loading the needed scripts onto specific page templates, I’m sure this will aid in google webmasters complaints for page load and render blocking script issues. Animate.css and wow.js were used for the animations and add a nice little bit of eye candy without going overboard I feel.
