Highly customized blog...where to start?

Using Ghost
1

I’m a designer/writer trying to create a unique blog experience (i.e. a decent amount of interaction+animation work).

I’ve pieced together a proof-of-concept with my janky front-end skills, but porting it all into handlebars/the ghost ecosystem seems, well, hard.

My question is: how would you go about building a theme if your dev chops are lacking? For one, I’m not even sure if what I want to do is possible. And two, I’m not sure if it’s a good use of time (I’d like to focus more time on design and writing). I’m willing to hire someone to help me, but I don’t yet have a high enough “trust level” to post to the marketplace :slight_smile: I’m also not afraid to learn this stuff—just feeling a bit overwhelmed at the moment.

I should also say that I think the layout of my blog would make a compelling “Theme” for resale. IMO it’s a fairly elegant, animated, 50:50 split layout with citations that “unfold” in-line. And it doesn’t seem like it’d be THAT hard for a true front-end guy to make. Any thoughts?

Potential partners?

2

Sounds to me that you might already be capable of taking on a theme for Ghost :blush:. Ghost themes are designed in such a way that they provide an extra layer of existing front-end technologies, aka HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

When I first started doing front-end I hit a bit of a wall when using WordPress and PHP with my existing static front-end code. Handlebars I find to be a much less steep hill to climb. I’d suggest checking out our theme docs as well as the official Handlebars docs to see if it’s something you can get your head around. I’d also take a look at our theme starter which you can use as a starting point for your theme:

The alternative is to join forces with someone who has more Ghost theming experience. If you prefer that you’re in the right place! Hopefully someone from the community will join this thread and offer their experience :blush: