For the past week I spend a lot of my time sitting in coffee shops and searching for inspirations for my website. And I don’t mean by staring blankly at a cup of coffee in front of me, but rather through an extensive research, going back to Laura’s recordings and finding resources online.

After some thought and a lot of trial and error, I ended up creating 2 custom pages and an additional one that I later customized as a 404 error page. Moreover, I was able to create a contact form and with some adjustments I think I was able to make it work properly.

The lessons I have learned is that if you don’t taste the real flavor of web design, WordPress might seem like a piece of cake. However, it is a statement that could not be further from the truth. The system is very sensitive; make one little mistake and your entire site can stop working and you are left with the pulsating anxiety of a white, blank page.

Also, you cannot fully rely on the parent theme, as by following a template you are not really creating a unique online presence.For example, with custom pages I used for this website, one gets to choose certain aspects of the design that could potentially meet the needs of the visitors and also integrate the programmer’s personality into the design. For achieving this purpose, I used CSS: I could choose colors, edit fonts, their sizes and layout.Unfortunately, in many cases templates don’t give the control you might want to have. Thus, a customized site allowed me to choose what I want and the way I want it to look like. Still, there is a lot of work ahead of me, however, for a first time I believe I did a good job.