The advice I gave you a moment ago is the same one I have followed in recent years , that is, I started trying out different solutions that would allow me to have a starter theme ready to modify and transform according to the client's requests.
Initially I fell in love with WhiteBoard which, in its previous versions, provided me with a very simple WordPress theme without any style ready to be modified, unfortunately in the latest versions they had the great idea of becoming a framework and messing up the code that composes it.
Update 2016: It's been 5 years since the core of this project has been updated, maybe it's better to continue with the next tips.
Since I have always kept myself up to date, this change in WhiteBoard policies did not affect list of palestine consumer email me too much, after all, I was aware of the presence of many other starter themes that I could use.
My first choice was Bones, a well-developed theme that gets a lot of contributions in its GitHub repository (sadly no longer active). The main developer of this theme is very active in the WordPress community and willingly accepts changes proposed by other developers; this alone definitely makes it an interesting project to follow!
For other reasons, I can say that Bones is a great product also because it includes a large number of features ready to be activated and, in addition to this, it offers the possibility of developing your own CSS code thanks to precompiled languages such as Sass and (my favorite) LESS.js. If you still don't know these languages, all you need to know for now, is that they allow you to develop your CSS code at an incredible speed !