March 7, 2012 by lkinney90
This is the first post of my new, custom-skinned WordPress blog for IM365.
Though I understand the importance of learning to skin a WordPress-based site, I didn’t enjoy the experience as much as using a WYSIWYG editor like Dreamweaver because I wasn’t able to view and edit the HTML. I ended up using Firefox’s Firebug add-on to explore the different parts of the HTML so I knew how to edit the CSS. I feel like WordPress is appealing to two types of users: those who don’t care to edit the code and want to purchase a wicked cool theme for their blog/website, or those who are super awesome at figuring out all of the PHP pages and stuff that I didn’t care to delve in to since I wasn’t under the impression that this was the purpose of this project.
I had fun working on my CSS Zen Garden page. Since the content of the website was already created, I was able to focus all of my attention on the layout and styling. I had trouble at times because I was tempted to tweak the HTML file to better fit what I wanted to do, but it ended up forcing me to find different ways to do the things I wanted to do. I’m not sure replacing the section headings with image files using the font I liked was necessarily the best way to accomplish a custom font, and I’m sure there are some copyright issues to be discussed, but it seemed like the easiest way to ensure that users using different operating systems and browsers would see a consistent site.
I wish there would’ve been a way to do this project using Blogger since I already keep an active blog there, but I understand that WordPress’ depth of customization options is far greater.