Thursday, 27 November 2014

Evaluation

This project has been a funny one. I have never swung in my opinion of a project so much until now. I started off quite excited to learn about Wordpress as I had heard of it before and knew it was an important part of modern web development and very widely used. I thought it would be a valuable skill to learn.

However, I then started to dislike it quite a lot. One thing I cannot stand in design and creative endeavours is feeling like anything is trying to hold my hand and make me compromise on anything to do with design. I don't like programs with presets and plugins. I would prefer to build something myself that is rudimentary and imperfect than use something pre-made. I think that it makes it so much more personal and interesting and almost always when something tries to build or do something for me it isn't exactly as I want it to work or something is missing. When I started out using Wordpress I had a horrible feeling that that was going to be what was in store for me. Buying a theme and dragging and dropping plugins seemed very impersonal. I didn't hold out much hope.

That continued for a while, then my site broke for a few days. I pretty much gave up hope and effort for the project then but after it was fixed and there was a bit of urgency to doing everything I started to get it. There were a lot of opportunities for creativity and design. Going in the backend to edit fonts and colours was actually quite liberating and was very reminiscent of messing around with CSS and HTML and refreshing the page to see what the changes did to the site.

Now here at the end of the project I think I am leaning towards having really enjoyed it. I'm glad it is over now as it was a lot of work in a somewhat short time scale however, I do see the potential and power within the platform. I'm not sure if it is for me in the long run and I do prefer coding by hand but I definitely will bear it in mind for the future. It was really valuable to get a glimpse behind the curtain and understand a little more about Wordpress at the very least and that was a good thing to come of the project.

I am really glad I managed to work in a lot of graphic design and illustration into the project though. That was a really fun side to it. Without that it had the opportunity to be quite a drag, Using graphics and Illustrator made it so that I could flex some creative muscles. Anyway all in all this project was a positive I feel.

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