Building Themes With Purpose
I have been working as a developer since 2017. Over the years, I have worked with thousands of WordPress themes, websites, layouts, plugins, customizations, fixes, migrations and development projects. Some were straightforward. Others required days of debugging, rebuilding, performance work or understanding why something that looked perfectly fine on the surface was failing underneath.
That experience gradually changed the way I look at WordPress themes. In the beginning, the goal was often simple: make the thing work. A layout breaks on mobile—fix it. A plugin conflicts with the theme—investigate it. A website becomes slow—find the reason. A customer needs a theme redesigned for an entirely different business—figure it out.
Eventually I started asking a different question: why keep fixing the same problems in other people's themes when those years of experience can be used to build better products from the beginning?
From working with themes to understanding them
Working with a large number of themes gives you a very different perspective from simply designing one. You start seeing what buyers struggle with after the perfect demo disappears and the product reaches a real WordPress installation.
A theme can have a beautiful screenshot and still be frustrating to use. It can offer hundreds of settings yet miss the controls that actually matter. It can perform well on a clean demo and become painfully slow once real images, analytics, advertisements and plugins arrive. It can look excellent on desktop and become uncomfortable on a phone.
Every one of those situations became a lesson. Over time I stopped viewing a WordPress theme as a collection of templates. I started viewing it as a product—one that should solve a specific type of problem exceptionally well.
Why DevCodes exists
For years, most of my work involved improving something that already existed. There is enormous value in that because it forces you to understand many approaches to WordPress development. But eventually I wanted to start from a blank page and ask: if I understand a particular industry deeply, how should the theme be built specifically for that industry?
That is the philosophy behind DevCodes. Not another multipurpose theme that claims to serve every business on the internet. Instead: understand the niche, identify operational problems, and develop around those realities.
Quality before quantity
I am not interested in releasing twenty themes simply so DevCodes can have a large portfolio. I would rather release fewer products and spend much more time making each one genuinely useful.
That means checking long titles, missing featured images, nested comments, child themes, plugin interactions, smaller screens, caching, thousands of posts, unusual content and future updates. Those details rarely make exciting marketing screenshots, but they are often what separate attractive software from dependable software.
Why Get GNews came first
The first major theme is Get GNews. That choice was deliberate. News publishing is one of those areas where the difference between a generic blog theme and a purpose-built product becomes obvious very quickly.
Newsrooms need speed, clarity, author transparency, structured content, accurate dates, reliable images, thoughtful advertising areas and clean mobile reading. If Google News is an important distribution channel, technical details matter even more.
Get GNews grew from that understanding. It is not an attempt to promise guaranteed Google News inclusion—no responsible theme can do that. The goal is to remove as many technical weaknesses as possible so that a legitimate publisher's own theme does not become the obstacle.
Built beyond the screenshot
Marketplace products are naturally judged visually, and design matters. But I want DevCodes products to be judged by what sits underneath as well: clear architecture, proper theme/plugin separation, safe updates, native WordPress behavior, accessibility, responsive layouts and features that exist because users need them.
Eight years of learning, now turned into products
Since 2017, development has taught me something new almost every day. Sometimes through successful builds; often through difficult bugs. Debugging can teach more than building ten easy features.
DevCodes represents the next chapter: taking years spent modifying and improving products created by others and turning those lessons into products whose philosophy and quality reflect what I have learned.
A theme should earn its place on a website
There are already thousands of WordPress themes. Nobody needs another one simply because another developer knows how to create it. A new theme should justify its existence. It should solve something, improve something and reduce friction.
Get GNews is where that journey begins. Not as the theme with the longest feature list, but as a focused attempt to create something carefully engineered and genuinely useful for the publishers it is designed to serve.