Project Three

Commerce Site

Although I’ve built websites using WordPress before, this project was a lot more frustrating for me to tackle than the first two — and it all boiled down to the themes I chose. For the commerce site, I initially used a theme that required Elementor and I didn’t realize that the theme wasn’t going to translate well using the standard block editor, so I spent a lot of time trying to use Elementor for some pages and the block editor for others — which as you can imagine, was a big mistake and ended up being a large waste of time once I realized we were not supposed to use Elementor at all. In the end, I had to pick a new theme (Michelle) and it ended up working flawlessly with the block editor, and the plugins I used were Side Cart WooCommerce, Tidio Chat, and WooCommerce. I’d say for this site, I didn’t find that I truly acquired any new skills because once I got past the theme issue, it was really easy to implement what I’ve learned doing the first two projects for this one as well. Although, I will say that I feel more comfortable using plugins now! In the future, I’d like to figure out how to change the classes of elements in WP, because I wanted to hide the site title for only the homepage, but because every site title was under the same class, all of them are hidden — which is not what I wanted. Overall, I am proud of the work I was able to do for this site (incorporating a site icon, video, gif, fully fleshing out every product, etc.) and this concept was a lot of fun to play around with!

News Site

The news site was much less of a headache to complete, although I did feel like I didn’t have as much room to customize the site as I did for the commerce one. I used the theme Viral News for this site and within the customizer, I was able to format the front page in a multi-block layout. For plugins, I only used Newsletter in order to create a email newsletter sign-up widget in the footer. Outside of that, I did a lot of work within the actual posts to add various elements (i.e. graphics) that weren’t included in the original stories (which I found on Thrillist), and I designed the site header image myself. Also, I included the links to both my production homepage and my project three reflection page in the social icons (I did this for both the news and commerce sites). While, I’m certainly pleased with the way this site looks and how it's structured — I feel most proud of the work I did on my commerce site.