I spent a lot of time over the weekend getting familiar with the StudioPress Enterprise Child Theme that this blog is built on.

Once again, I realised that it is one thing to see a design you like and another to replicate it, even with a platform as friendly to non-coders as this is.

The Genesis people do have a Showcase of sites developed on the Framework and that is helpful for inspiration and for specific ideas about layout, styling, navigation and so on.

But I quickly noticed that what seemed like a preponderance of the example sites (I did not go through all 65 pages of them) were marked “Custom”. That is, they had not used one of the several Child Themes you can buy from StudioPress, let alone one of the free ones available.

I could outsource the design of my main sites but I’m quite clear that at this stage I want to do this myself, not outsource it.

So I realized I need to be very clear about what I as a non-coder can do.

And in the longer term, to make the best use of this platform and if I am still doing my own tweaking, I will need to get some knowledge and skill in the CSS coding department, which I could learn at, for instance, the W3C school.

Even then I would expect some Trial and error.

That’s partly what this site is about, being available for trial and error. I called it my sandbox, without at first realizing that would sound like a bad pun.