My biggest challenge with my final project was that WordPress made everything seem too easy. I get it, programmers are lazy. Every time I tried to make a customization, I found out that there was a plugin that did all the legwork.  Also, there was a customizer (pretty sure it came with my theme) that worked through all the code and gave me a scary warning message when I tried to access the code manually. I was brave and bypassed it, which allowed me to customize the front page code.

Most of my code ended up being shortcode (that I did still customize) so I felt like I didn’t do the work on my site. My interactive map, which I feel is the pride and joy of my site, took the most work. I spent a lot of time inputting the photos, creating markers and linking to photos. I could not figure out how to make the photos on the markers bigger, so I had to settle with linking to larger photos. Between creating the map and the child theme, I feel like a real coder.

Overall, I found myself scrambling to create more customizations. Some things I incorporated were social media feeds, my interactive map, my resume, a custom meta box that allows to select which publication an article was written for and a contact form. My favorite feature on my site is the hero video. It makes me feel like my site is very modern.

Aside from the difficulties I had throughout the process, I have one major issue. My site still isn’t up because I can’t access the SFTP client.     🙁