Building My WordPress Website – Class Project

I just finished up my WordPress website for my IS 301 class at UNR. I’ll have a link on my “Hire Me” page, but here it is for simplicity’s sake -> project301.cheyennekelly.com

For IS 101 last summer, we set up personal websites similar to this one. This summer, we had to make a shop for a pretend business.

Since I’ve been spending the last year working with 3D printers and did a whole semester-long project on LulzBot, I decided to “start” a 3D printer company. My “company” makes a small, cheap 3D printer that works entirely with mobile apps. Honestly, I would be so excited if a product like this existed in real life. I think 3D printing is something that will become more widespread as time goes on, especially as a hobby and the technology gets cheaper.

I had a blast building this website. Since we weren’t allowed to use website builders, I started with a basic theme and made improvements through the “Custom CSS” window in the appearance customization menu. In addition to learning that margins could have a negative value (!), I also learned a nifty trick to help figure out what actually needs modified.

First, I opened my website in an incognito mode window in Chrome. Then, I right-clicked on the element I wanted to find out more about and selected “inspect” from the drop down. This brought up the HTML, CSS, and other code that makes up the website in a sidebar in the Chrome browser. Mousing over the code highlighted the associated element on the website itself. Using this technique, I was able to modify my menu to make it match the pre-made homepage features and fix the location of the titles on the rest of the pages.

Although I’m still learning about front-end development, I had a lot of fun building this website even though it was just for a school project. I hope to get more opportunities to build more websites in the future.