Why a small WordPress theme shop is named after Greek gods \u2014 and why the naming turned out to be the most useful design decision I made.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I expected the names to be decoration. They became the thing that kept the work honest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I have spent seven years building websites for a company. It is good work, and all of it is to somebody else’s brief.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I wanted to make something that was mine,\u00a0and somewhere to put the part of the job a brief never has room for.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
WordPress is where I went back to,\u00a0which surprised me\u00a0\u2014\u00a0I had rather assumed I was done with it.\u00a0It turned out to be like running into a friend you had lost touch with:\u00a0familiar,\u00a0considerably changed,\u00a0and far better company than I remembered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Most commercial WordPress themes are multipurpose.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One theme,\u00a0forty demos,\u00a0a slider,\u00a0a page builder,\u00a0a shop,\u00a0a restaurant menu,\u00a0an events calendar,\u00a0a portfolio grid,\u00a0and a settings panel with several hundred options to switch it all on and off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They sell well, and I understand why. A buyer sees forty demos and thinks: whatever I need later, this covers it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What actually happens later is that you use one demo, and carry the other thirty-nine forever. They are in the download, in the update, in the CSS your browser parses, in the settings panel you scroll past every time you want to change one colour. A theme that does everything is a theme that has never had to decide anything \u2014 and every decision it declined to make is now yours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I did not want to build that. But the alternative \u2014 one theme that does one thing \u2014 is a hard business: too narrow to sell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So: four themes. Each one allowed to specialise hard, sharing a foundation so I only build the foundation once.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Four names that had to be distinct, memorable, pronounceable, and \u2014 this is the part I underestimated \u2014 had to mean something specific enough to argue with.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Greek gods have one property that made them right: each is the god of<\/em> something. Not a mood or a colour, a domain. And once a theme is named for a domain, the domain starts answering questions about the theme.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Athena<\/strong> \u2014 craft, strategy, the patron of people who make things carefully. Editorial and portfolio work. Be strong.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Apollo<\/strong> \u2014 music, poetry, light. Musicians, bands, podcasters. Discography, tour dates, episodes, streaming links. Be yourself.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Hera<\/strong> \u2014 sovereignty, the institution, the established order. Consultancies, agencies, companies that need to look like they will still exist next year. Be good.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Hermes<\/strong> \u2014 commerce, roads, messengers, and \u2014 the myths are honest about this \u2014 merchants and thieves. The shop. Product templates, cart, checkout. Be smart.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Hermes was the one that convinced me the scheme was right rather than cute. He is not associated<\/em> with trade; he is the god of it. When the naming and the job line up that exactly, it stops being a label.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The four themes are sold from a fifth theme, which is not for sale. It is called Olympe<\/strong> \u2014 Olympus, the mountain the gods live on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It exists only to sell the other four. It has one client, ever: me. And that turns out to matter, because it means Olympe can be opinionated in ways a sold theme cannot. It ships no photographs \u2014 every texture in it is a CSS gradient or inline SVG. It makes choices a buyer would want to override, and no buyer ever has to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Naming it for the mountain rather than a fifth god was the point at which the scheme stopped being four names and became a structure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here is the useful part, and the reason I am writing this rather than a post about fonts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Every theme accumulates feature requests \u2014 mine, mostly, at two in the morning. Athena could have tour dates. Hera could have a discography. Any of them could have a shop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The names give me a question that answers itself: whose is this?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Tour dates are Apollo’s. Not because Athena couldn’t display them, but because a theme for writers and studios that also does tour dates has started the slide into being a multipurpose theme with a smaller demo count. A shop is Hermes’. Pricing tables and logo walls are Hera’s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is a scope constraint wearing a costume. I did not design it that way. I noticed it working about three months in, when I caught myself not building something because it belonged to a different god.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The foundation stays shared \u2014 block templates, the typography library, the section styles, the colour system. Nineteen font pairings and four palettes in each. What specialises is what sits on top.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A few things I decided once and have not revisited:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Block themes, not page builders.<\/strong> Everything is a block template, a template part or a pattern. What you edit in the Site Editor is what ships. No proprietary layer that stops working the day you switch theme.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fonts are local.<\/strong> Every family is in the theme folder \u2014 around thirty families and a hundred and thirty files per theme. Nothing is fetched from a font CDN, which means no visitor’s IP address goes to a third party to render your headings. That started as a performance decision and turned into a privacy one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n No theme requires a plugin, except the one that must.<\/strong> Hermes needs WooCommerce, because it is a shop. Nothing else in the family requires anything. The contact and newsletter sections leave a slot for whatever form plugin you already use.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Everything is translatable.<\/strong> Every user-visible string, including the ones hiding inside block attributes, which is harder than it sounds and is a post of its own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There will be more themes. The list is long \u2014 what is short is the number that earn a place on it, because each has to do a job the other four do not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And if one of these is nearly right for you and not quite, I would rather hear from you than have you fight the theme. Custom work is what I came from and I am not trying to leave it behind; a theme is simply the version of it that works when a bespoke build does not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What I want is unglamorous and specific: to keep working in WordPress, and to build things for people who will actually use them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The demos are live, one per theme, each running the real thing rather than a screenshot. Most of what I write here will be something that cost me an afternoon first \u2014 the undocumented corner of WordPress that ate a morning, written down so it eats less of yours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Start with whichever god does your job.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Why a small WordPress theme shop is named after Greek gods\u00a0\u2014\u00a0and why the naming turned out to be the most useful design decision I made.<\/p>\n I expected the names to be decoration.\u00a0They became the thing that kept the work honest.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":265843788,"featured_media":1038,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1366],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-themes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timotheacreations.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1048","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timotheacreations.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timotheacreations.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timotheacreations.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265843788"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timotheacreations.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1048"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/timotheacreations.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1048\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1055,"href":"https:\/\/timotheacreations.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1048\/revisions\/1055"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timotheacreations.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1038"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timotheacreations.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timotheacreations.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timotheacreations.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}And a mountain<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
What the names actually did<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
What follows from all of it<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Where this is going<\/h2>\n\n\n\n