For the past 6+ years, I’ve been responsible for the customer journey, user experience, and design of my company’s e-commerce website. As the Creative Director at SCUF Gaming, one of my key responsibilities has been to ensure the consumers can find their products clearly and quickly, and get them to the cart and checkout without abandoning it. This is all about performance. The other key responsibility I have within that is to make sure the site looks as good as it can from a layout and design perspective, as well as all of the content (video, photograpghy, and copy) being populated on the site look and sound as best they can. This is all about aesthetics. Neither of which have anything to do with coding – haha! Part of my commitment to this program is to learn [at least the basics] of the other side of all of that work. This project has given me a glimpse into those foundational elements and has helped me understand some of the basics that I was simply missing.
However, there’s nothing like a few hundred lines of code to show me how “right-brained” I truly am – wow! Being so visually connected to creative for so long was a massive hurdle the past two weeks. I’m so used to “pen to paper” via Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign to create visually, that creating via “type and numbers” with elements and categorical definitions and made my mind melt a bit. I just didn’t get it at all. I often hit a wall of frustration with my mind and eyeballs showing a blinking “does not compute” with the more finite details. As a professional in this field, I had big aspirations of making a site look “super cool” and “highly functional.” Instead, I found myself struggling with so many of the basics that I had to take a step back, and realize this project wasn’t about that. It was about having a basic understanding of those concepts to then work through it all.
After that, I really got into a rhythm with the baseline setups of the pages. I found myself automatically getting into a decent pace with the auto-populations and being able to feed into them accordingly. I kept saying “get the basics right” outloud. Once I had that, I started to feel a lot more positive about some of the more foundational elements. Applying styles, google fonts, and getting the nav to function properly were big wins for me. One of the big “light-bulb” moments for me was how much the CSS stylings can handle and how efficient it is to use them across your pages. I searched for tips online and found some ways to remedy issues I was battling and made them work. As ridiculous as it sounds, just being able to then go back into some of the source code of those examples we were shown, and reverse-engineer how those students worked through the solutions was great. Some things started to become logical, and by then I recognized things and felt some accomplishment knowing 3 weeks ago I had no idea what that code represented. Happy to have this portion under my belt, and anxious to get into some of the more modern systems ahead.