This final assignment has been my favorite project so far. The content sparked passion and more importantly I got to try out some stuff fixing my weaker areas of WordPress. I spent more time carefully choosing plugins and managing them to work together for my site rather than take away from it. I found issues in my first sites like my images being too big, I couldn’t back a site up correctly, and we never spent any time on post’s comments. I wanted more experience in these areas so I chose to do a WordPress assignment for my final project.
The site would be the same premise as my Project #3, except I’d fix those weak points I’d discussed and add more content. I really do want to showcase this website to potential jobs, so it involves news and stories in the music industry. In this project I got to implement some of the things I learned in my design classes and install a logo for the site. Giving the website its styling is what secured it as the front page of my portfolio.
During the commerce site, I messed up my backup and lost my site completely. Then I moved my new site wrong and had to make it a third time. I wanted to fix this obvious knowledge gap and understand what I could’ve done to prevent it. I found many plug-ins that would automatically backup this site for me. UpdraftPlus is the one I decided on.
After deciding on my backup Plugin I went to my next issue. The images I gathered were too big and took too long to render. To fix that, I worked with an image optimizer. With the help of the Magical Suite I made some of the wonderful content blocks you see on the home page. And there were a few more I just thought the site needed for functionality: Gallery Box, Easy Share, & Click to Top.
The site wasn’t complete until I got my logo in there. These are my words in these stories so I felt it right to brand them as such. I used the record logo with my name to match the URL, and show the long haul. My dream after career hopping two or three times is to own a music label, this project is a step towards that.
The record I made in Illustrator serves as a pictorial not only in the wordmark logo, but also as the image in the tab of this page. Look at the top of your screen and notice I couldn’t let the bland WordPress logo be there on my awesome site.
My greatest weaknesses in web development are starting to become strengths. I want to continue working in illustrator and photoshop to give my websites that edge. As a designer and a web developer, I want the shadow I cast to reach far and wide. I still have much to learn but after 8 intense weeks in Emerging Media at Grady College, I am confident in my foundation to learn more in this field.