WORDPRESS - AVADA / DIVI THEME vs. FULLY CUSTOM

Hey guys, so we're in the process of getting our site fully redesigned, currently our site is fully custom and not using wordpress. But we would like to start using the wordpress engine as our backend, so we plan on hiring a coder / designer to get everything done perfectly the way we want it. But our only internal debate is whether we should tell the coder / designer to build our site off an established premium wordpress theme like avada or divi or should we tell them to just custom build it from scratch.

We already have a pretty clear vision of how we want the site to look, so either way I think at the end of the day whether we choose fully custom or a premium theme backend it will look that way we want. But I guess our concern / question is which would be the best option to go in terms of making it easier for us to edit in the future. Like lets say we want to make some small little changes ourselves throughout the following year, I'm thinking that would be easier for us to do if the coder / designer uses avada or divi as the backend versus everything custom coded. I figure if its fully custom coded it might be harder for us to make changes ourselves in the future?

Is my thinking completely unwarranted or do I got something here?! Really quite lost here, as I've never really used wordpress much in the past, so not really sure on best practices, any help / suggestions would be awesome, thanks!

 

Let me first point out the fundamental thing:

What about the CONTENTS? Do you know what CONTENTS the site is going to have? You are already in the "complete a$$ backward" realm if your first concern is how your website looks.

If your coder/developer is telling you otherwise, don't walk. RUN, and find someone else who is competent enough to show you how this process is supposed to work. I'm sure @deathshadow could point you in the right direction.

If you must hear more about building a TurdPress theme, I recently learned how to make one from scratch in my intern job. Here is what I learned:

First, consider NOT using WordPress. There are many reasons I sometimes call it TurdPress. Again, I'm sure @deathshadow can shower you with more technical details far better than I ever could. Anyhow, I have already dealt with a few WordPress sites that can be a static HTML site, and I find it to be a colossal waste of time. My boss's clients most often don't even want to deal with updating their websites, and most of their sites are no more than ten pages. They send stuff in MS Word, and one of my tasks for the past couple of weeks has been to write a block of HTML content with proper tags for a bunch of my boss's client sites. WordPress's editor outputs some funky things unless you copy and paste raw HTML into it in its text mode. I keep scratching my head why they even want to use WordPress if they can't be bothered to take advantage of WordPress features. And not to mention its utter inability to output proper HTML, to begin with.

Second, steer clear of those builder themes, if you absolutely must use WordPress. I have indeed fiddled with them but found them to be extremely bloated and unnecessary. WordPress theme is not that hard to make. At the barebone level, all you need to do is to have just one-page template, call it index.html, change index.html to index.php, put a WP comment in style.css and load it via functions.php. Honestly, I think it's DUMB that WordPress has to make you use this convoluted procedure just to load a CSS file, but it is what it is. It's like picking up your dog's poop in your yard and wonder why it smells so bad. It's nonsense. It's poop for F*** sake. Deal with it, or don't own a dog. You have that choice, believe it or not! Anyhow, you can them transfer static contents to WP and put WP loop tag in place. From there, you can keep adding ONLY the things that need to be dynamic.

In any case, you should worry about your contents first and foremost before worrying about how your website looks and which fancy pants WP theme you are gonna get suckered into buying.