I’ve come pretty close to getting my website to look and function the way I want it too. Using plugins I was able to create simple galleries for my posts, allow star ratings for certain parts of my posts when I want my users to rate something, and I gave myself the ability to post with footnotes. Much of my writing tends to be filled with “bonus” information that I feel enhances the post but doesn’t contribute to the coherence of the main article (aka I get sidetracked really easily and don’t want my readers to miss out on extra content just because it doesn’t go well with the rest of the post), so footnotes were key.
I finally figured out how to get my header to fill the top of the screen, and there are a few other styling things I want to do, but I’m happy that it doesn’t look too much like the original Twenty-Twelve theme. Eventually I want it to be unrecognizable, similar to the way that AMCtv.com and some of the other great WordPress sites are. The tough part here will not only just be the design (I’m not much of an artist, so I’ll probably be borrowing a lot of styling from other sites) and keeping the site optimized for mobile. While I’ve got the site looking good for computer users, it looks downright terrible on my phone. I’ve found some good tools for testing live sites for mobile, but I already have an iPhone and could do it on my own. I need to find a tool that lets me test my local site on a mobile emulator, because I don’t want to have to keep updating my live site just to see if it is optimized for local.
It looks like I’ll be spending the rest of the night trying to fix what has been plaguing me: custom meta boxes. I’ve been through three different tutorials, and still can’t get my custom box to appear. That the last real functionality piece that I need, but it’s also the one that’s been giving me the most trouble from the start.
Besides looking at Codex or Smashing Mag examples, you could look at other plugins that include custom meta boxes.
For your “what does it look like on mobile?” issue. You can always minimize the browser size by dragging in the bottom right corner to reflect what you’d see on either a blackberry or iPhone. Much easier than sending it over to your live site and testing it that way. The way the code is set up its either adaptive or responsive design. Adaptive changes the way the website looks when it reaches certain break points. Unfortunately this isn’t the most ideal thing as not everyone has an iPhone, or one common device that everyone is looking at your website one. Responsive works on something similar to a fluid grid where it changes at various points (if you would even call it that.) If you’re using 2012 I want to say that it has responsive built into it so the browser resizing should do the trick effectively. Good luck!