Tag Archives: WordPress

Pieces

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This week I got to work a lot on my final assignment. I had a mini heart attack when I mistakenly deleted my htdoc folder and thought I lost everything. I was able to find it in the trash and restore it, but then my website stopped working. Then, when I got back on my desktop, I was able to restore it all. Thankfully.

I watched a lot of videos and tutorials. I read a lot of articles. I asked my friends many questions. I think what helped me the most was taking the time to absorb all the information. All the materials I found were very helpful and allowed me to articulate different ideas into the final project.

I am going to take the time on Tuesday during class to work through some other areas of my website and make it better.

I want to take some time and reflect on the process of developing my code. I started by wanting to customize a contact form plugin. That idea went out the window when I realized what WordPress already offers, so I decided to just use an already existing code. I, then, decided I am going to code a plugin for the services I offer. This plugin ran well, but I had an issue connecting the menu on the first page to the services plugin.

The second thing I was working with was a plugin that asks the user a question. The question is “what is your favorite social media platform to use?” the user would submit an answer to that. The final thing I did was a child’s theme to the Twenty Seventeen theme I choose. The child theme changed the font and the color of the main text. I inspected my website and made the changes there first then came back to my Sublime and made changes to the code.

I also added social media platforms and other codes into my website. I also changed the main theme’s image into a Georgetown one, which reflects a big part of who I am as a professional and a person.

Overall, this was a great exercise to work with WordPress because it is an extremely useful site. As I used it more and more, I got to learn a lot about it. It is SEO-friendly since it is written using standard compliance high-quality code, which I came to learn is loved by Google and other search engines.

Learning and re-learning

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I’m officially at the “just keep going” stage of a big project like this. It’s been hard (but getting a bit easier as it goes on) to compartmentalize the project in my head. I am a very linear and visual thinker, and things like recipes, instruction manuals, building projects come easily to me, and I’m consistently underestimating how long each step is taking me.

Little problems with the mechanics of my plugins are popping up every now and again, and the fixes almost always come from finding somebody online who have made some similar mistake and reading up on how they’ve fixed it. This is a workflow that I’m still getting used to. The real anxiety comes when I feel like I’ve followed instructions to a T and something just doesn’t work…ugh.

On the other hand, I’m having a fantastic time pushing my styling. I’ve done some sketches and designs for the overall feel, and even if it doesn’t come together exactly how I envision, I’ll be happy because at least I had a direction. I know enough about myself that I can be successful when I create as I go, but having an end vision especially when talking about design language is a more surefire bet.

Overall, I’m feeling tentatively optimistic, I’m looking forward to workshopping and in the end, actually having a working website that I can say I put together pretty much fully myself. Although I’ll take as much time to do it as I can get!

Setting up for success

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Much of my weekend was spent getting the pieces together to be sure my site will come together well. I’ve been going back through old stories, pulling together photos and videos, and making sure the relevant metadata comes with the content (things like dates and captions).

I’ve been rediscovering WordPress too — the plethora of themes, plugins and possibilities are exciting. It’s getting me geared up to do my own site, yes, but think about how these tools could be useful in the professional world too. Many nonprofits I’ve worked at need help with this sort of thing!

This is all to say I don’t feel overwhelmed with all the tools and technologies we’re trying to pull together to actually make this thing — FileZilla, WordPress, GitHub, Sublime Text, MAMP…the list goes on! But of course, my biggest anxiety comes from actually building these plugins. I’m constantly worried that whatever I start to build and enter granular commits for will end up not working in the end.

I feel fortunate I have some friends who have web development experience I can bounce ideas off of and take advice from. And that my classmates seem to be going through the same anxieties!

Press the Word

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I spent this week trying to play around with WordPress. I realized that there are a lot of options available for us to use. There are a lot of existing code, theme, and plugin options that could be added to your WordPress site. There is also the option to code your own and create whatever design and functionality you want. Together, you can create the final full site you desire.

I went back to our readings about WordPress and reread the explanations of the various aspects and features. Through WordPress, you can build a website that meets your unique needs and help you build an online brand.

As I was exploring various customizations to add to my business website, I did a lot of research on how to become a top freelance consultant. I wanted to know how I could optimize my website as best as possible. I need a strategy and a vision directing my services. The first step in the strategy is picking a niche. The niche will reflect real expertise. My niche is doing digital communications in international development and governmental affairs. The second step is to set up a platform to attract clients to your business. The platform is, usually, a website. The website should include an explanation of the services, credentials and some testimonial to back that up.

The self-hosted WordPress site is great because you can have a cool domain name and you can customize it as much as you want with the thousands of plugins and themes available. You will also be in complete control of your site.

A personal website is a very important tool in building a business if positioned well. It shows customers and clients that you mean business. The website should be navigated easily. At the minimum, you should have an “about” page, a “blog” page, “services” page, “contact” page and the links to them displayed in the top navigation menu. Another important aspect of a personal/business website is linking the page to your social media pages. This helps build a real, relatable, trustworthy image of the person your clients are doing business for.

With that strategy in mind, I worked on developing my code customization for the website. I will add social media plugins to connect to my own platforms and make sure they reflect my brand. I want to add a contact me button on the front page that takes to a separate contact form page. I want to create a child a theme in the first page with “about,” “services,” “contact me,” and “testimonials,” with a hovering functionality, and once clicked, it will take us to the designated page.

WordPress and making stuff (sort-of) work in PHP

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The work we did in WordPress during class last week was very informative and I’m glad we’ve learned about child themes and plugins. I’m excited to try and create my own plugin now. Sometimes this stuff seems like magic. I was blown away at how, by simply adding a couple folders and files, a new plugin just appeared.

When getting to the PHP assignment, I felt ill-equipped, frankly. Coming off of spring break, after having just a couple weeks of lessons I had to revisit a lot of material. I used plenty of YouTube videos, forums and such to help out, but I felt like I was making small mistakes along the way.

I realized I still have fundamental questions that need answering. How does the computer understand my functions? Should my PHP files be on a server for them to work correctly? Why is it that in Sublime Text, what I know to be accurate PHP functions don’t show up in a colored text? That last one caused me a lot of anxiety!

I also didn’t know what else to add to my homepage in PHP to add useful functionality, so I resorted to just adding basic things that would (I hope) satisfy the requirements of the assignment. The only thing I added that I could see myself keeping in a final version is a contact submit form.

WordPress and PHP

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For this week’s assignments when we were going over WordPress more in depth and touching back on our previous lessons regarding PHP, I felt confident at first. However, that quickly waned as I realized that it was true, everything is getting harder as the semester progresses on. I will add that I was personally unable to attend the class session this week in class and reviewed the lecture with the substitute Laura via her shared video.

I followed along while watching the video as we reviewed the readings regarding making a child theme and felt successful initially, but for some reason I have yet to figure out, could not make my child theme from my folder via wp-content —> themes to appear on WordPress itself. I tried restarting the programs, my computer, WordPress, make sure I had no spelling errors, played around with the text on the lines and Google searched solutions to no avail. I spent more time on this than I’d like to admit but cut my loses after multiple hours. This is absolutely one reason why I wish I could have made it in-person this week. However, I did feel still relatively confident in my ability to figure out WordPress — because I appears very user-friendly and more simple than it could be.

Regarding the PHP assignment this week to make five PHP features and commit them to GitHub, I literally have no idea what I am doing and feel like I have lost my mind. Initially I was unsure of where to actually write PHP — WordPress, GitHub homepage or gallery assignment? So I settled on GitHub, the first homepage attempt from weeks prior. I didn’t see my text change colors to recognize functions and command in Sublime text, which was unsettling. I watch numerous YouTube videos and Google searched how to include PHP an reviewed the lessons on learn-php.org again. I read online somewhere while Googling that GitHub only hosts static material and doesn’t read PHP or similar code. So here I am confused and will try to make sense of it in-person tomorrow, apologies.

Never used WordPress before

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Reading about themes and how they interact with WordPress seemed relatively straight-forward. When I think of a theme, I think of it as something similar to the different themes available on PowerPoint of Word documents — they do all the design or color schemes for you. Now with the templates, those appear to be a bit more intricate on WordPress than choosing a different theme. Index, home single and so on .php seem like elements that strictly control posts in WordPress. To be honest, I have never had any experience on WordPress before. Even though I have heard of it, I know that it is one of the most widely used hosting sites, so this will be interesting and hopefully not too frustrating for me to learn alongside employing PHP. When reading about child and parent themes, the concept of discerning the difference between the two is reassuring since that it something I can understand without re-reading.

As for reading about plugins, I like how sincerely they start off by stating that there is a “cardinal rule” for WordPress — not to touch the core. This is good to know for someone with no existing experience because I will remember that statement. So it seems that plugins are what allow WordPress to add any additional functionality to my site, which is cool. To my understanding formats, they change the layout or display of certain elements such as images, gallery, videos and such. Also good to note that when concerning post types, that it is not recommended that I do custom post types along with a theme, but should instead use a plugin. The custom data in the form of meta-data seems to be a fun/interesting way to incorporate more tidbits of information on my WordPress site. It reminds me of the same available stuff you would see on Facebook.

Themes

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I am extremely excited about my final project. As I explained in my final project pitch, I will be working part-time, so my business idea of creating a business site is going to help me build a name for myself and freelance my work. I have always wanted to create my own business website and this will be a step into my dream of building my business. I was thinking of combining a personal blog with information and details about the business services that offer. I want the site to reflect my brand and personal touch and reputation.

I am still conflicted on who to target specifically and what would be the best approach for my audience. I want to do more research on my audience and learn more about my best opportunities are. I have always been interested in the food and hospitality industry. I am going to work with a coffee shop for my capstone class and help them create a business strategy for their digital platforms. That would be a great chance for me to see my interest in that industry and whether or not I want to continue in that industry and line of work. My background is mainly doing political PR. I worked for the embassy of Jordan and will be moving to work for an international organization in a few weeks. Private companies are profit-driven, while working in international development is not. It is driven by making a difference and leaving a positive impact in the world, as well building a good brand and reputation. Their mission is usually intangible.

For the readings this week, I was really interested to learn more about the different concepts used to describe different aspects of a site. Learning more about themes and formats allowed me to understand the backend work that comes into play to create the final version of a site, which is beneficial when building a site. While the content and the style are very important to the way a site is displayed, the theme creates an overall look to the final version of the site. A post type is also another aspect to the different types of content in WordPress. The post type shows how different posts have different content and layouts. For my new job I will be working with meta-data a lot. I was happy to get that exposure in our readings.

Website theme development

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This week’s readings on theme development and parent/child themes was good. In the past when I’ve used WordPress themes, they were usually the pre-made ones. I’m really interested in learning more for the most customization ability possible. (As for plugins, I’ve only dabbled in them in the past.)

Having the formats laid out in the post themes section was helpful. I already knew about galleries, quotes, images, video and link options. But the aside function is new to me from a programming/developer perspective. And within the suggested styling section of that same page, I actually think I found what I previously was curious about doing (per my final project idea rundown). It says a chat option is available. I wasn’t sure if this was the same style that customer service friendly pages have (with automated responses queued for simple questions and more specific questions sent directly to on-call staffers). But if it is, I’m definitely interested in pursuing this for added functionality.

I’ll also be revisiting some of I believe week 4’s lessons on scripting zoom-in function for images after the cursor hovers over them. And customizing my navigation bar is something I’m looking forward to, considering I’ve only been able to use the limited settings from pre-made themes in the past.

I also am grateful for the post types to be neatly arranged in the section on this topic. I have something to reference for my boiler plate, as opposed to pulling them together at the end and forgetting the other page options apart from the basic index.html, JavaScript and CSS pages. I know from the start to create a page for each and organize them accordingly.

And it’s finally time to write up my developer profile. I’ve already got the content from my interview and I can finish writing it this week. I was fortunate to have a great subject, who is currently employed with Facebook.

website – Musician’s Haven

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What: I want to create an internationally respected musician’s hub that provides reliable information and reviews on instruments and other gear for beginners to professional performers.

Who: My audience would be musicians or aspiring musicians looking to purchase gear. It’s terribly easy to waste money on items that you either don’t need and waste time putting off things you do need. I’m hoping to have a few dedicated “contributors” which would serve as a middle ground between Reddit and Wikipedia where site visitors could get reliable information.

Why: I’ve spent a lot of money over the past 9 years since I started playing music. If I knew what to buy and what not to buy, I’d be alot better off. Similar to used cars, I think having a “go here, do this, don’t do that,” resource for newbies would result in fewer people purchasing lemons.

Code customization:

  • I will include a search bar with PHP
  • I will include a gallery at the top of the home page, and a different gallery on each page
  • I will create a “shopping cart” for bookmarking items with JavaScript
  • I’ll use CSS to style the pages
  • I will have an embedded 16:9 format video playing at the bottom of each page demoing some instruments (depending on what page it is)
  • ill create a search bar using PHP
  • I’ll embed a Twitter feed

—- More specs below—

Above the fold front page automatic slider (4-5 images) of different types of gear (acoustic guitar, bass, microphone set-up, etc.)

Below the fold two column review section (featuring an image of one instrument and a user’s highly rated review of the instrument)

Top right “shopping cart” that would essentially be the “bookmarked instruments” personalized and accessible from your login)

  • Home
  • Acoustics(guitars, bass)
  • Electrics(guitars, bass)
  • Other instruments(ukulele, cello, viola, violin, etc. etc.)
  • Vintage gear(includes every aforementioned category but only features higher quality and very expensive gear. Some will be repeat posts in this page)
  • Price guide

The review section would include the MSRP and the average selling price online (Ebay, for instance) to give the user an idea of how much they should reasonably pay for said instrument

Each page would have an above the fold slider with 8-9 images of instruments that in a traditional cms would be easily refreshed with newer content throughout the month.

As for more details on features, I’d have changing text overlaying the images on the sliders, along with neat button navigation that starts from the beginning. I don’t believe we went over this in class, but I want to know how to create an easily accessible pop-up comment/Leave a message feature. (screenshot attached). It would give users the ability to leave a comment about something they want more information on, whether it’s an instrument we’ve featured or one that we haven’t.