In customizing WordPress, most people look first for a splendiferous and fancy theme. There are thousands of options, so we can usually find something that gets us 80-90% of the way there. But heavens to Betsy, that last 10-20% can be hard to find! That’s why it’s good to learn how to make a child theme, which lets you keep almost everything while adding to or removing from your original theme safely. Most of this talk with cover the creation and use of child themes. This is an absolutely essential (and pretty easy to learn) skill for any WordPress designer.
As a bonus, we’ll take a peek at creating a “feature plugin”, which is a very simple kind of plugin you create just for your site. They’re easy to make, and let you customize your site in ways that will stick even if you change your theme later.