I download a lot of themes for WordPress… to try them out, to have them in case I need them later or because they have features that could make them THE them I am looking for.
I have been trying to sort out the idea of personal websites and blogs for a while.
Building a single site to reflect a wide range of interests trades convenience for a mess of mismatched posts.
Creating a blog for each category of interest feels more logical, but ends up with the added maintenance of multiple sites, each with their look and feel and capabilities.
After trying out many themes, I learned the hard way that WordPress is wonderful at delivering great features to a site quickly, but these features also come at a cost.. the cost of future updates down the road. I also learned that I have a tendency to come across a more interesting theme eventually, and I will have to rebuild my personal sites again someday.
Some themes like Divi are masterpieces full of features, but they rely on too many shortcodes to make future upgrades something to consider lightly. Once you chose to use them, you better get married to them for a long long time.
This is how I ended up using Make as my current common framework across my personal blogs. The theme comes with many options, a good feature set (although limited compared to Divi) and a light footprint for future upgrades.
I will keep Divi for ‘one off’ projects that need a lot of features from the start and do not require much upgrade once they are launched.