When I started thinking about modifying my site for “Bling” assignment I decided to set some boundaries for myself. Since I do coding of WordPress for my living I decided to ban myself from child-theming and customizing the code and attempt to get the results I want by using out of the box features and customizations that come with the theme.<\/p>\n
Next came the most challenging thing:\u00a0to use out of the box features. I found that I have been relying on modifying the theme with css and php to give it functionality and the look that I want so much that I found myself a little frustrated. I wanted to have a very simple site with logical and easy navigation that included an aggregation of my other digital spaces. Because this site is content-heavy I wanted the simplest theme but with a lot of customization features. After looking around for quite some time (as there are so many themes out there!) Nature Space theme fitted the bill. After playing around with couple of plugins and few widgets things fell into place.<\/p>\n
Overall, it was interesting to put myself in the seat of a regular user, not a web-developer. It gave me a different perspective and an insight on the workflow that students will have if they were to use WordPress for an ePortfolio site without having a web developer background.<\/p>\n
One of the reasons I think this assignment was required because as educator when you ask student to use technology you have to be comfortable with that technology yourself. If I were to ask students to use WordPress for building an ePortfolio I would have to be comfortable enough with it to be able to assist students with the platform as well as create short tutorials and give helpful tips on how to use it effectively. Another reason is that as digital citizens we should be able to create our own digital homes that reflect not only what we do and our thoughts, but our personalities. Customizing this site was a great exercise not only in creative building but a decision-making about what should be included to share with the world.<\/p>\n
The advice I would give to anyone\u00a0using WordPress is to write a list of things you would like to include on your site first, then investigate the widgets and plugins that will allow you to expand the site’s functionality, and lastly take your time selecting the theme to make sure it has all custom features you will need, and absolutely lastly — create a couple of pages and couple of posts and play with as many themes, layout options, menus, and custom features as time will allow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"