I thought this might have been an ongoing series in the beginning of this blog but it turns out I’m not as good at multi-tasking as I thought I was. When I first launched the site, I thought I just had to get something out there and stop fussing over the look and feel. I had a design mock ready to go before I finished the first post, but the thought of writing the code was too daunting and I wanted to publish ASAP. Of course, what happened in reality was as soon as I got started on the code I had trouble putting it down and switching back to writing. Sometimes it’s hard to leave a task unfinished – or at least to start a new one while the previous one still sees you scornfully.

The first thing I put together was a logo. I wanted something that would feel appropriately bubbly and maybe a bit tongue-in-cheek. I didn’t want to fall back on what had become my stock tricks when I got to design something for myself – turn the effects up to 11, lean into blackletter typefaces, and lose all of the restraint I have to show when working for clients. I started building a mood board and then almost immediately got back on my bullshit and just sketched whatever in Illustrator.

Now came the time to set the layout for the site. My initial thought was to keep the design pretty minimal, like an old WordPress site. I played with a couple of options that are now lost to time unless I pay up to Figma to access some old archives. As I worked through the file, things kept drifting from the vision of “header / sidebar / footer” that I was initially working with, but I decided to lean into it. Instead of going with a standard header, I’d have mine off to the side. The sidebar would be locked in place and help the site feel more expansive on wider screens. I’d lower the information in the sidebar to keep it more easily adaptable on small screens. Everything was starting to come together.

I had never written a line of PHP, but I figured it couldn’t be that hard. I taught myself Shopify’s Liquid language years before – it’s just another templating language.

First, a static prototype was written in HTML, CSS, and Javascript to ensure the styling was right. Then I set up Local on my machine and started to make the content dynamic. I’ll admit, it was a lot of time spent on WordPress.org and Stackoverflow trying to get some of the functions figured out. 

The main pages were pretty easy, but when it came time for the category and archive pages, I ran out of patience trying to understand how to loop through the information I wanted and reference all of the bits of information I wanted, so I turned to ChatGPT. A quick prompt and the function was doing what I wanted. As rewarding as it is to fiddle around with code until you can get it to do what you want, there was a certain novelty to this foray into AI coding.

With everything running on Local, I went ahead and uploaded my first WordPress theme. Now that I’ve done this, it’s probably time to take the step I’ve been putting off for about 10 years now and convert my Portfolio site to a WP template. As part of doing this, I moved my domain over from my old hosting provider to this one and got a more barebones plan. It feels nice to be getting my hands just the littlest bit dirty again.