Wow, what a journey it has been. From HTML to WordPress, I’ve learned more than I could’ve imagined. This final project has been the ending of the perfect storm of this class. I decided to craft a site for my friend’s online boutique called Chloe’s Closet Repurposed. She started out posting pictures of her outfits and slowly evolved her site. She now thrifts, alters, and repurposes clothes to sell to her loyal following. Chloe is one of my closest childhood friends, so I thought this would be a good final project to take on.
Creating an actual functioning e-commerce site comes with its own set of challenges. First off, you have to actually set up a payment method so that people can purchase your items. Taking a deeper dive into WooCommerce was definitely intimidating, and it took me a couple of days to figure it out. It was also a challenge to communicate with Chloe about pricing and such. However, it was cool to work with WooCommerce and gain a better understanding of how it worked. I learned that WooCommerce can calculate tax rates for you so you don’t have to stress about that. Chloe also wanted to invest in Jetpack so she could understand the analytics of her shop, so it was cool to see how the JetPack plugin operates.
One of the most frustrating issues I cam across was choosing a theme. Many of the themes provided required page-builder plugins, and we all know that those are a no-no. While I totally understand why I should stay away from those themes, they are the best looking templates. I found that most themes that did not require a page-builder and were compatible with WooCommerce were rather bland looking. I decided to go with the classic and trusted Storefront theme because I know it was created by the same people who created WooCommerce. All of the products are displayed nicely and it is very compatible with all of the plugins. The only frustration is that it definitely took extra work to make the site look exactly how I wanted.
While making this site, I found that I am actually more comfortable on WordPress than I thought. I feel like I have a better understanding on how to organize certain element of my page including widgets, menus, plugins and images. On the first WordPress assignments, it all looked like a giant puzzle to me, where on this project, it was just a matter of seeing which widgets worked best. I even searched for plugins that would allow for social media icons in my footer. Also, I worked with a plugin that now allows people to contact Chloe for commission work.
Overall, I am really proud of this project. I think the site is beautiful as well as functional. I took a deeper dive into plugins as well as customizing css to import fonts and colors. This project also allowed me to create graphics which was really cool. I created the site logo, banner, and header using creative tools such as Canva and PicsArt. The final project took everything that I’ve been working on and added the challenge of being practical and just figuring it out!