Save yourself a headache down the road and make sure you are using a child theme for those edits!

One of the most important but most often-times overlooked aspects of developing with WordPress is the creation of a child theme. Why a child theme you might ask? In short, a child theme ensures that your edits and tweaks to the main theme files do not get overwritten when you update the theme. Here’s an example…you are using the twenty-fourteen theme and you want to change the padding of the list items in the recent posts widget (for non coders, you want to give more room to the titles of the recent posts in the sidebar). If you go into the main theme style.css and make the change it will work…but only until the theme gets an update and then all of your changes are GONE! Yeah, so how about we make a child theme. Here’s how: