The website looks deceptively simple, which many times made me feel as if I’d made no progress when I’d figure out one problem just for it to be followed by another. Before mentioning the biggest challenge I faced, I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring up my frustrating experience(s) with the various plugins I installed on the site.
Prior to building this site, I hadn’t really relied on plugins that much, often opting to write intricate CSS that could fulfill my artistic vision. However, I knew that this site would require elements that I wouldn’t be able to do with my novice skills and a limited block editor (although I still did try to use CSS before I turned to plugins — bless last week Maddy’s ambitious heart). Trying to find a plugin that could accomplish what I thought to be simple tasks was surprisingly a little difficult. I quickly found out that Google makes it incredibly complicated to extract reviews from their website (sidenote: I still don’t know what an API key is) and that I should avoid plugins that beg me to buy their “PRO” version because chances are their free version is laughably bad. While I’m slightly annoyed that I couldn’t use custom CSS to move the Font Awesome icons from the back of the flip boxes to the front, that’s a small price to pay for the rest of my plugins working the way I wanted.
Now, as promised: my biggest challenge. Initially, I only wanted to hide the page title on the homepage, but because I couldn’t assign it another CSS class, I was left with the option of hiding all of the pages’ titles. I thought that I could work around it, but as luck would have it, my theme left a glaring white space on the homepage where the title once was (a major oversight of the theme developer especially since you can disable the page titles within customizer under the theme options). I inspected the section over and over again, scoured forums, and changed the padding numerous times but still, a tiny bit of the gap remained. In the end, I turned to Professor Weatherford, and he so kindly helped me out — teamwork really does make the dream (website) work.