My final project for NMIX 6110 was creating a freelance website for my friend Hannah’s poetry account. For her website, I decided to use WordPress, as it is the most user-friendly and in my personal opinion, the easiest to use. At first, I actually did not think that I was going to use WordPress for this project. In fact, I was very much set on using bootstrap. The reason that I was so set on using bootstrap, is because while WordPress may be easier to use, I liked the way that bootstrap made websites looked over WordPress sites. However, ultimately I decided that functionality was way more important than the way a site looked, and given what I wanted to do with this project, I ultimately decided to use WordPress.
The overall goal that I wanted to accomplish through this project, is that I wanted to create a base website that I could eventually pass off to my friend, as she was an NMC student, for her poetry account. This was also the first project that I had ever commissioned for someone else. I wasn’t so sure that I was going to enjoy working for someone else, but it was actually really enjoyable! In order to accomplish the overall goal that I had for this website, I first needed to pick a theme. I decided to use the theme ‘creativiley.’ I decided to use this theme, as it overall had good ratings and it seemed to fit the criteria I had for this project. The theme, did turn out to be fairly decent, however, I do wish I had maybe looked into a few more themes. Overall, it did do its job, and it is very easy to maintain- one of the main reasons that I picked the theme was its easibility of use.
In addition to picking a theme, I explored plugins that would enhance my site. I decided to use a form plugin and another plugin that would display PDFs, as that was the majority of what I was uploading for this project. The form plugin, can be seen on the home page of my site. In the end, I did not continue using the PDF displayer on my site, as while it did do what it was intended to do, it did not look the most aesthetically appealing. Ultimatley, to display the PDFs on my site, I used the column block editor and put different images with a link to the PDFs on the pages. I found that this was a lot more aesthetically pleasing and I liked how a user would have to click an image in order to view the PDF. While I do not have any screenshots of what the previous look was, I can firmly say that it was not pretty. Instead, I would to display what I changed the PDFs to, as that is what I am most proud of in this whole project.
While this is what I am most proud of for this project, it is also what I struggled the most with. Before I figured out how to actually display it the way I wanted, I was having a lot of trouble linking the PDFs in a gallery, as there was no place that I could insert the link to the photo. I finally realized that using a gallery was probably not the best way to display the images, and I began to explore the column features. Overall, as you can see, this is what I ended up using. I really liked the way that wordpress lays out the columns, as I was not a fan of how they stacked before being put in columns. I would say that I overall spent the most time trying to figure exactly what I wanted for this section, as it was what the bulk of this project was. Something else that I struggled with, was that I could not at first figure out how to align images. I was doing things the super complicated way, and going through and editing the CSS. This ended up changing the entire block, and all I really wanted to do was center the photo! I am attaching a screenshot of what I was trying to do originally.
Clearly, this is overly complicated to just center an image. After reaching out on slack, I learned that there is actually just a feature in wordpress to center an image. Looking back, it is kind of funny that this is what I was struggling with on my wordpress site, but as it did state in the course, the best way to learn wordpress was to use wordpress!
Overall, by completing this project, I was able to get a much better understanding of wordpress and all of the features that it offers. I am really glad that I chose to use wordpress for this project, as I feel as if I am walking away with a much better undestanding of how wordpres works, and I am excited to continue working with and learning wordpress through my EM journey.