For our third project, we learned how to use WordPress to create two types of websites. The first of which was a blog/news style website, and the other was a functional e-commerce website. Please note that for these sites, we utilized content from other sites on the web and focused on designing the site itself as opposed to creating unique content. I really enjoyed working with WordPress because the infrastructure this platform has greatly expanded my capabilities for adding functionality to my site. Overall, I learned a lot about to how install and customize WordPress themes, how to install various sites on WordPress, and how to use the platform as a whole.

News

When considering what kind of content I wanted to incorporate into my news site, I decided to take a more blog-oriented approach and create a recipe blog site. In creating this site, I did the most experimentation with the home page. I added a header image, changed the site identity, modified the sidebar to make it easy to navigate to different categories and recent posts, and listed the five most recent stories on my site with image thumbnails, titles, and descriptions. In order to better organize my site, I created different sections and categorized my stories by different types of recipes. Initially, I struggled to create separate pages for each type of recipe using the categories feature, but after some experimentation I managed to do so successfully. Meanwhile, within each post, I followed a standard structure of including a cover photo, introductory paragraph, ingredients, and the recipe, as well as a link to the original. Amidst this content, I experimented with different types of headings and lists to help keep each recipe organized and consistent. For additional elements, I added video and image blocks to certain stories.

Aesthetically, I sought to keep this site clean and simple with a majority black and white color scheme. I was really happy with the typography this theme utilized, so I maintained consistency with that throughout the site. Overall, I really enjoyed making the news site and could see this being a style of website I may create for myself in the future.

Commerce

I found the commerce website to be somewhat more of a challenge than the news site to create. With this site, I wanted to take a more creative and artistic approach. Thus, the biggest struggle I faced was making the site visually appealing from an aesthetic perspective. I don’t always consider myself to be the most creative person and often struggle to create things that are artistic and arrange elements spatially. However, I wanted this site to be a bit more creative, colorful, and reminiscent of other beauty sites that I’ve seen. I initially struggled to change the color palette of this website. I wanted it to have a clean, simple theme but with some element of color that would add an artistic flare to the layout. So, I attempted to use the customization feature on WordPress to create my own color palette and make various elements sage green so that the color changes would be consistent throughout the site. Initially, I really struggled with this since the feature isn’t always the most specific, so it took a lot of trial and error to determine what content would change color with each element of the color palette I changed. In terms of style, I also changed the font used throughout the website to a sans serif font which I thought was more simplistic and conducive to the messaging on the website.

In order to customize the CSS of the site, I also modified the top bar, which taught me a lot about how to inspect the HTML and CSS of the existing template and change it using classes to suit my site’s needs. Furthermore, I focused a large amount of my efforts on the homepage of the site. I redesigned this page a handful of times, as I was consistently unhappy with the look of it. Initially, I downloaded a gallery widget which I used to create a gallery of makeup and beauty images as a site-header, but it ultimately seemed to lack purpose and functionality. Thus, I changed the first element of the home page to a more dynamic block with an image, title, and button linking to the shopping page; I believe that this is a more purposeful block which fits better with the flow of the site. Structuring the layout of this section was difficult at first, but after experimenting with various elements I achieved my desired look. In terms of the product pages, I sought for a consistent layout which included an image with a zoom-in feature, title, price, product description, and other suggested products. I also added a reviews feature and wrote some reviews for the products listed on my site. I really enjoyed making the product pages in particular and was happy with the way that they turned out!