The biggest thing I learned while working on this project is that I dislike WordPress and would rather code. That being said, it was fun to work using a more front-end development method and gave me major respect for anyone who can successfully and effectively use WordPress. I used Google Gemini and Imagen 3 to generate all of the images and articles for this website. I struggled a lot with getting my pages to display as I had edited them and then to link to each other. However, upon figuring those things out, it ran much smoother. I wanted the website to be straightforward and uncluttered, in line with the theme of calmness. I also used colors other than black and white sparingly, only to add emphasis. I like the look of a black header and footer with white space in between and how it scrolls nicely. My content was split into two categories: one focused on in-depth information and the other on day-to-day topics. Those categories are the different links in the navbar and show corresponding articles. I decided to add an audio feature so that when you first load the website, it starts a 4-minute mindfulness practice. I like the idea of having people come to my website and immediately relax before delving into the content or quickly and easily resetting without even needing to read. My next goal is to figure out how to edit the look of the audio bar so that it can better match and be less gaudy (I’ve tried and tried, but couldn’t figure it out). I also made it so that the tagline “calm your thoughts” on the home page scrolls to the bottom of the header section, which I think looks very clean and smooth. The theme is called “twenty twenty-two.”
This website made me question everything. I dislike WordPress for shop-building purposes, but I like it for content sites. Through the process of designing this website, I deleted the entire thing three separate times. I learned how to navigate WooCommerce and other plugins to make this website functional despite encountering numerous issues linking products and pages. I used a theme with a plug-in that I can not tell whether made things easier or harder. It provided me with a good array of templates to customize to my liking, but it required me to do everything twice. I utilized AI to generate the descriptions and most of the images for the website. I like how the pages all look similar and reflect each other. Additionally, the color scheme is neutral and sophisticated. I also found a way to integrate my content website with this one so they are linked directly, as they have similar themes. The theme I used is called Woodix E-Commerce, and the plug-in is called Superb Addons.