FF Project End

I had a good wrestle with the responsive side of this project. Even after watching the tutorial videos it took me awhile to understand what I could and couldn’t change in the different views so that the changes I made would only be made in that view. I ended up rebuilding certain sections just for the view I was in and creating different footers for each mode.

I also started understanding how to hide elements in certain views, like spacers, and then adding that same element back into the view I was working in, sizing/adjusting it for that view. That way the changes didn’t mess up my other views. In the beginning I had gotten on a role with making adjustments and then realized it messed up all my other views so I had to go back through everything and redo it.

I have mixed feelings about the responsive features in Elementor. On the one hand I love that you can just switch to a particular view turn things off and on and make adjustments. On the other hand, it seems like if your design is not laid out in a particular fashion, trying to do quick and simple adjustments can be anything but. However if the choice was to rebuild everything from scratch I would still take this feature because at least when you do rebuild for a particular view, you have all of the elements right in front of you vs. having to hunt for them in the other views and flip back and forth.

I found there were some glitches happening with Elementor that became frustrating. I had to keep going back through all my pages to check the design and make sure that it was still the same as I left it. Things like: all of a sudden having an orange divider line show up on a couple of my pages, I have no idea where it came from and couldn’t figure out how to get rid of it. All of a sudden my page width setting started changing, so I kept having to go back in and reset and update the width. Whenever I added the footers for each view the page width would then revert back to a different size that I would have to go back in an adjust again. Weird stuff like that I found just took up a lot of time trying to figure out.

I don’t have any good insights as to what I think might work better. I think the more I work in Elementor the more I will learn and understand and then have better insights as to what I would like to see. I feel like right now I’m still to new to it/it’s still too new to me and I have a feeling once I become more proficient I’ll probably find answers to things that are frustrating me right now.

http://www.saraacdesign.com/FFriends/

Project 2 – end

I’m definitely feeling the big-ness of this project as it has come to an end.

High points of the project were: hitting on how to use Phlox portfolio in a way that utilized it as intended but in a new way that fit the project/content I was doing it for, realizing how much I liked Elementor and was so happy the days I got to do most of my work in that format vs. in Phlox.

Low points of the project were: I struggled a lot with the css and spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to customize things, a lot of times coming to dead ends. It was very frustrating and felt really inefficient. I wish Phlox was more intuitive, so often when I would find something and could change it I wouldn’t remember where I found it because it was like finding a needle in the haystack. I’m wondering if with our next project, not using a theme will make things easier? Giving us the ability to customize anything and everything vs. only being able to make certain changes because of the restrictions of a theme?

Overall I feel pretty good as being a first bigger project, I was hoping to be able to use this for my portfolio, but I’m not sure if it’s a project that’s clean enough UX wise to use?

Doing this project definitely hasn’t dampened my enthusiasm for WordPress. It just makes me want to learn even more! One thing I feel I need to do is relearn css; I feel like this is something that is really going to trip me up and hold me back moving forward and I don’t want to be held back by my lack of knowledge in it.

Looking forward to our next build!