Child Themes

After having words in tutorial about the best approaches to building up a wordpress theme, Charlotte took about 2 hours out of her day to pretty much teach me how to integrate any design into wordpress through a child theme. Giselle's way of teaching it us last year.

I've got pages of notes about the logics of how to navigate through wordpress and the intricacies of codes not to touch. Real sound move, cheers Charlotte.

Learnt that you can pretty much put any design into wordpress, its the get header and get footer php files that are the same on every page, creating new php files for other areas of content is easy as pie.

After beginning to integrate one page of my dp3 into wordpress (http://www.el-ay.co.uk/test/about/ - for some reason takes ages to load. something ill have to be careful of with Switch) I've pretty much got to grips with the child theme way of doing things.

Concerns :
Although integrating it this way means I can be free'er with the design, as its all my own coding as if I was doing it through dreamweaver alone, I realized that in terms of content management this way of doing things isn't the easiest for a client to use. Whole point of Switch choosing wordpress is to have an easily maintained site, after meeting them, hassle free is pretty much a key ideal. Although I learnt codes that can be put in to pull content through from page editor sections to the design in the back end, meaning the client has little as possible to do with theharsh codes and can use the basic page editor process, the design of the site will not be flexible to the content. It will stay at the fixed heights and width and design that I've coded, which means Switch would have to provide me with their content and so I could design a bespoke layout. I guess this is not the proper way thats to be used in industry but the learning curve student way, before I learn how to code a completely separate customized parent theme myself.
I'm going to look at parent themes and see how theyre used. Im wondering if after I've finished my final wireframes and layouts I should hunt down an existing parent theme similar to my ideas to work with and edit, whether that would make the site easier to manage for the client. No point handing them something thats 65% of what it should be.

Im gonna investigate, and see which is the best way of keeping true to a creative and novel idea, but that will allow everything to be changed at the whim of the client.