As the article states, a starter theme gives you a 1000-hour head start on every project by providing everything that you need to get started including lean well-commented HTML 5 templates, 5 sample css layouts, organized starter style.css, navigation.js to create a toggle dropdown menu for small screens to name a few.

My favorite features of _s Starter Theme is that you get:

• well-organized, modular file structure
• Built in SEO
• Validated markup
• Responsive styles

Also compare what your initial impressions of the starter theme method are vs. the conversion method. What would the advantages and disadvantages of each method be, do you think?

The obvious advantage of using a Starter Theme is that you don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time you create a new theme. Since it is open source and in continual development, it reflects all the newest techniques and best practices to date. Another advantage is that in its bare bones state, its validated and works at all screen sizes. A disadvantage, is the possibility of “breaking it” when trying to customize it to create a theme. Another disadvantage is the existence of a lot of extra files and code that you don’t need.

The obvious disadvantage of the “markup” method, is that you are starting from zero. With no starter files, you have to build and style all the theme template pages from scratch. This can be very time consuming. Responsive styles would need to be built in to the templates as well.

The advantage of the “markup” method is that the developer has more control over the theme. It only contains the files you need.