WordPress: Content and Commerce.
I started this project with the Commerce site. I had the structure in my head, sketches done, and was ready to roll. I started with the product pages and started compiling the content for these super easily. I added video, attributes, the brand filters, and really felt super comfortable getting these all setup. Then I went to start the homepage and, to be honest, I was completely lost.
“Uhhh, now what?” My biggest struggle here by far. “What did I miss?”
I went back and rewatched the lecture and was reminded of the “design your storefront” bit and obviously then had my lightbulb moment.
“Ah, instead of exiting out and not saving that, that’s where we build our homepage. Got it.”
So, I went back to do that and the rest came so natural – it was super intuitive from that point. I found myself going back to polish some things and really get some details in like the Favicon, adding the services, team, and social panels to the homepage. I kinda loved it. Super gratifying and finally something that looked how I envisioned it from the beginning. I felt really connected to the system and how to integrate the filters, categories, attributes, and was alt-texting everything super easily and fluidly. Honestly, so proud of how this commerce site turned out.
Content on the other hand… ugh, I kinda hated it? Hahaha. Again, I started with the posts and those went pretty easy. Basic, but easy – I stuck to the template like you said in the lecture and everything looked fine. I got into the groove of adding pictures and videos, throwing in some lists and categories to make them a bit more robust. Felt confident with those skills to create the individual posts – I actually had to stop myself from creating all nine. That part was all good.
I felt pretty confident knowing I done all of this in the same order as the Commerce site, and felt like the home page that brings it all together would be just as full-filling as what ended up before.
Nope. And, I got frustrated trying use the standard blocks to make something look pretty. Shifting to the patterns definitely made things more appealing and then adjusting colors, fonts, etc to match the look I was aiming for. Getting into the site editor and adjusting the templates got me closer, but I still had some decent “bugs” in places that I simply could not figure out how to get rid of. That dark gray bar under the nav, above the hero image? Not intentional. Nor is the one between the social panel and the footer. I could not get those to work right.
While I think my content site “checks all of the boxes” technically, I’m not super happy with it like I am the Commerce site. I think spending more time with some of the broader templates might get me where I would want to go with WordPress in the future. There’s so much capability with WordPress that I feel like it’s like a Photoshop. Even after 20 years of using Photoshop, there’s so much to learn and so many different ways to accomplish it all. I’m sure the more I use WordPress, the more muscle-memory I will form with it.