I have always been a keen learner, Would rather read a technical manual than a book (rather wait till the movie comes out). I first designed a website to show a off project I did at Stow College was quite Good and technical with diagrams and circuit boards and downloads( do wish I still had it ). I then designed a site for my business TMD Computers in 2000 a very basic site.
Why web design
As a computer nerd and amateur dabbler I designed a website for the Provincial Grand royal Arch Chapter of Glasgow in 2003 in html, but it was not implemented until 2010 until after hearing about WordPress. I decided to try it out, found it easy to understand and get to grips with (want a page just click , name it and put the text in and hey presto a web page ) All the information needed to control the site is done by plugins ( you name it they got it) This brought me to another great feature a theme, with so many different themes out there and some of them Premium I tested a great number of them and finally found Weaver Pro this gave me better control over the look of the site (and another learning curve), I can now understand and use Css and can always find help at S3schools when needed. I enjoy the challenge of putting the website together with the look and layout of the site
So far I have learned
- Html quite good
- Css Quite good ,getting better all the time
- php (can get by just)( pods frameworks pages and Templates)
- Plugins how to use them and change the way they work
I make great use of the Forums available and have posted Many questions, i have even started to help others answering their questions ,even finding a bug in the code of a plugin. With more advanced Php Code I get help from a very nice programmer in the USA free gratis, I know what I want to do but not how to write the code implement it
Webmaster
Having a new found skillset I put this to use designing the websites for the following and as well as being webmaster for each, I also put in all the information on each site (at Present)
Research private site
Provincial Grand Royal Arch Chapter of Glasgow
And of course this site
I also run a mirror of each site for test purposes (with everything its configure , test, test and test with other plugins before putting on the live site)
I use the following for all sites I design
The code on the snippets page will be for one of the above plugins but each Plugin has its own extensive documentation available just click the icons to go to their main site
All the sites I have designed are based on WordPress
the main Plugins I use are
- Pods Frameworks:- the best I can recommend. Before using this I spent days changing names on a page each year for 20 chapters, 5 cryptic councils and 4 lodge & Councils each time messing up the page layout, with pods you create a new pod , the a record for each chapter etc, the fields in the pod is what shows on the page, you create a template and put all your code there , the information in each record shows up on the page in the same format changing a name is as simple as loading up the record and change the name see result here this does require a bit of learning and uses php a lot and {@magictags}
- Contact Form 7 As it says And Great Documentation requires other plugins Really Simple CAPTCHA
- WP Show IDs :- should be provided by wordpress
- wp calendar based on fullcalendar
- WP-Mail-SMTP
- WP Photo Album Plus (lots of configuration features for total control) got to see his site it show everything you need
- WP UI – Tabs, accordions and more, useful in a great number of situations you can see it in use here
- Page Builder (my latest find) very useful set up Different rows with columns that can take widgets ,text , html, pictures basically locks the contents in desired area
- Theme My Login :- great for sites open to membership
- One-Click Child Theme :- Essential to save all customisation made to the site
- Comment Guestbook:- a form of comment but listed like a guestbook great integration
- Widget Logic :- useful for hiding widgets when they don’t have any data to show ( calendar no upcoming events)