April 19, WordPress Site Review and More
After a winter hiatus, the DACS Web Design workshop/SIG started up again on April 19, 2016.
At this meeting we focused on a website developed by Andy Woodruff for Sofia Chiarandini, a young musician with many talents. http://www.sofiachiarandini.com/.
Andy presented a description of the steps he took to get the site up and running. Hosted on dreamhost.com, this process was not entirely smooth, but we learnt from both his experience, and the solutions he found. See his presentation here (PDF)
We then looked at the current website, both the front-end as well as the admin area, and discussed what Sofia can do to continue the development of her site, and some possible design improvements. My analysis included some of the below observations:
- Tighten the empty space at the top of the page, to make page content more visible in the browser window.
- The main navigation links could be consolidated so there are not so many
- Edit the CSS for the colors and styling of the calendar to coordinate better with the site color scheme
- Add Social Media links, and a FaceBook ‘share’ link
- Write blog posts to keep the website fresh and updated
- Theme used is WordPress “2016”, but recommend using a “Child Theme” to allow style edits
- Make sure WordPress and plugin’s are kept updated
Next month’s meeting will cover the setup of a WordPress “Child Theme”, an essential theme for any website running on WordPress. This allows all theme modifications to be done in the Child Theme, avoiding any possible loss of edits when the “Parent Theme” is updated.
Read more about Child Themes here: https://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes
