I am a third-year Agricultural Communications student who is also earning their Masters in Journalism & Mass Communication through the Double Dawgs program.
I love to read all things fantasy and mystery.
Reflection: This project was definitely a fun, yet challenging task!
I knew that I wanted this site to cover one of my favorite bands, Sleep Token, and I wanted to keep the site in-line with the band's overall aura/theme.
Because of this, the site's background color is primary black, with a gradient that slowly morphs into a vibrant red color. Since white provided a nice sense of contrast against both black and this bright red, I ultimately chose to use white as the primary color for any text found on the site.
I struggled with getting the graident to behave across the site's three different pages, but after a few YouTube tutorials and some revisits to the FCC homework assignments, I was able to get the gradient to work out! I am very happy with how it turned out!
Moving forward, I would like to grow more familiar with the aesthetic design portion of website development. Right now, I am able to create a basic website from scratch - which is a huge accomplishment on its own - but I would like to take my sites to the next level by adding more aesthetic design elements into my website development process.
Reflection: This project was definitely the toughest one yet!
For this project, I wanted my site to give off a more dark academia vibe, given the topic my sites covered (libraries), which is why I chose to work with different neutral shades of brown and gray.
I had a lot of fun planning this project out, but once I started fiddeling around with the various components of Bootstrap, the more confused I seemed to grow. Throughout this project, there were many frustrated sighs, countless YouTube videos watched, and a few moments where I just wanted to quit altogether (I'm looking at you, Panel One).
Trying to create an entirely responsive site is so much harder than I could have ever realized. With each step I took, and each addition I made to my panels, I was constantly double-checking that the site was responsive trough the Inspect function, and I am so relieved that it seems to follow these responsiveness guidelines.
Overall, I am extremely satisfied with the project's end result, and learned so much along the way! So while this project was (sometimes) the embodiement of my worst nightmare, I am proud of myself for sticking it out to the end.
Reflection: Out of the two pages created for this project, I definitely felt myself struggle less with the content page. This might be due to the fact that I tackled the content page AFTER having struggled with the commerce page, or perhaps because I enjoyed the material on the page more. Nevertheless, I am incredibly satisfied with the end outcome of this particular page.
On this page, the largest struggle I faced was the Google Fonts implementation through the "Custom CSS" portion of the Wordpress platform. I kept getting the same error message over and over, and Google was not doing a great job at explaining exactly why I kept recieving this message. Eventually, after much frustration, I figured out what my mistake was and was successfully able to get my desired font into that custom CSS sheet.
Outside of the font issue, the largest barrier of this particular page was just how long it took me to customize all of the different aspects of the page elements. My chosen theme for this page, Blogier, provided me with various widgets and page layout pieces (i.e., footers, sidebar widget options, etc.) to choose from, which made customizing these elements extremely time consuming. However, I am very satisfied with the end result, so I would say that the somewhat tedious customization process was well worth it!
I've worked with Wordpress in the past, but never before to this depth. I would say that one of the biggest takeaways from this project was how to strategically select reliable themes for a Wordpress website, and then also be able to further customize these already heavily-customized themes. And, all in all, that is exactly what I feel like I have gained throughout this experience. With this being said, however, I would like to further experiment with some more themes in the future to really play aroun with them and get to the bottom of my customizations options and capabilities. There were a few elements within my particular theme that I would have liked to have further customized, but was unfortunately unable to do so. Hopefully I can grow more familiar with the theme customization process, so that in the future, I will be better prepared for this process!
Reflection: This page was definitely the tougher out of the two for me. For quite awhile, I was struggling to get my products to accurately display on the products page, and even with our WooCommerce lesson, I encountered several WooCommerce-related obstacles that I struggled to overcome at times.
As previously stated, I used the WooCommerce plugin for this site; My chosen theme was Storefront.
I struggled the most with getting all of my elements customized and formatted the way that I envisioned. In fact, there are a select few elements on this page that are not entirely to my liking because I just could not figure out how to get these elements to listen. I tried to override the theme's exsiting CSS guidelines through the Custom CSS tab of the "Customize" section, but even then, some sections just would not budge.
In comparison to my Content page, I am less happy with the end product of the Commerce page. But, that doesn't mean that I just dislike the entire page. I just feel like I didn't know exactly how to manipulate and properly customize this particular theme's elements like I did on my Content page. But, since I worked on and completed the Commerce page prior to the Content page, this could be why I feel stronger about the Content page than the Commerce page.
Above all else, I feel as if I learned more about the WooCommerce plugin capabilities when it comes to the various design and functionality elements (i.e., widgets) this plugin provides. Moving into the future, I would like to do some more research into the various plugins that I could potentially use on future Wordpress projects and grow familiar with some of the more commonly used ones, that way I can feel much more comfortable if I end up using these plugins in the future!
Note: Reflection for this project can be found/viewed on the project homepage.
Reflection: This final project was one of my favorites to get to work on so far. I knew from the start that I wanted to pursue either the "Speculative Redesign" or "Freelance/Friends and Family Project", and I ultimately ended up smooshing aspects of both aspects into my final project.
For this project, I created my website inside of Wordpress. For the general theme of the site, I selected Pentatonic to use as a starting point for my site since it's overall layout suited the look and feel I was trying to accomplish with my website design. On top of some of the plugins/widgets that came pre-installed with this theme, I also installed & activated the Forminator plugin to help create a contact form for one of my site's pages.
When it came time for the customization portion of this design process, there were several aspects of the theme that needing editing in order to match the overall look that I was trying to accomplish. The website that I ultimately ended up designing is meant for a popular true crime podcast that I've loved for many years now. But, even after gaining a ton of popularity, they still don't have a concrete website of their own - so even though the podcast teammembers aren't any close friends of mine, I still wanted to see if I could create a website worthy of hosting all of their awesome content.
If you would like to take a look at their current 'website', please visit this link to do so! My goal with the site that I designed was to not only give the podcast a space to host their podcast episodes but also allow site visitors to learn more about the hosts and present them with a direct opportunity to reach out and suggest a true crime-related case for the podcast team to consider for future episodes.
This go around, I feel as if I learned how to customize the CSS for established Wordpress themes much more than when I previously worked with them back during Project 3. However, there were still very small elements that I could not, for the life of me, figure out how to customize. But, even with these struggles, I still think my customizations flow well with the standard customizations set in place by the theme.
I will say that because of how long my selected podcast, Morbid, has been creating podcast content, it would have been nearly impossible for me to make separate Wordpress posts for each individual podcast episode - which currently sits at 560 (I would have been sitting at my computer for eons). For this, I do apologize. But, for the podcast episodes that have been added onto the site, these are fully fleshed-out as one might expect for a podcast. I made sure all of the content I included in each of these podcast episode postings exactly mimicked what Morbid originally posted alongside their episode to keeping everything as cohesive as possible across all of their social media platforms.
Now being at the end of both this project and this course, I am incredibly stoked with how much I have grown as a website developer. Granted, I still have much much more to learn. But for someone who was so incredibly intimidated by coding just weeks ago, this is a huge accomplishment for me, and I have greatly enjoyed all aspects of this course!