This week was the first time I started work on my personal site and I have to say, it was fun! It took many hours, and I have yet to see any serious progress, but the act of collecting my materials, selecting my website template, layout the basic building blocks of the site, beginning to research my code additions, and taking a first step at coding a slideshow, were all exciting endeavors.

When I first began my work this week, I was unsure where to start, so I began with our readings, which I think was an excellent first step. Specifically, the story about the stone soup helped me to realize that I was my job to see the big and solve problems one step at a time, as opposed to getting caught up in the ‘magic’ (and overwhelming nature) of WordPress. I also thought it was helpful to hear the authors insights on “design thinking” because I think this is something I was struggling with internally. When we spoke last week, you mentioned that we should not focus so much on ‘design’ at this stage of the game and more on process. After reading Shh! Don’t Tell Them There’s No Magic In Design Thinking I realized that you meant don’t focus on the pretty buttons and colors that will make our site visually pretty, but do focus on the design layout and practical reasoning for design that will make the site function. This helped me organize my thoughts and led me to my first step in the creation process.

I selected my WordPress template and narrowed down the two tabs I will use on my site, ‘Recipes’ and ‘Request a Recipe!’. Then, I choose the recipes and pictures I would use for my site and got those organized into posts so I could see the basic functionality – the home page will host all of the recipes as ‘posts’ each with an individualize slideshow and recipe instructions and the Request a Recipe! page will house the personalized form for visitors to fill out. I think began trying to code the slideshow feature and, I believe I made some progress as I got the slideshow management function added to WordPress, but have not yet figured out how to make the Widget fully functional.

Regardless – I enjoyed working on the code and enjoyed seeing little wins each time I got my code to sync correctly with the WordPress software, so I’m excited to continue my work!