Commerce: Making this site was super fun! As an avid Squishmallow collector, I have always thought about selling some of mine to make room for more, but I have never been able to emotionally let go. I am proud of how the fonts turned out on this project. The more I clicked around on this website, the more classes and elements I realized there were, and I kept having to update my CSS. While it was a little frustrating, it was also somewhat of a fun Easter egg hunt. I also love the pastel colors of the buttons and links, as those are some of my favorite colors, and they are similar to the Squishmallow branding. One element I struggled with was the home page. Figuring out how to format the text that overlayed the image using custom CSS was very difficult for me, but I eventually figured it out. While I do not plan on selling any of the Squishmallows on this website, it was fun to pretend. For reference, all promotional writing from this site besides the reflection came from ChatGPT.
Content: This site was a nightmare! First, I definitely chose the worst theme possible. I know we have been taught to not use super complex themes, but I had a moment of bad judgment and was trying to deviate from my usually simplistic web designs. I regret this. By the time I realized I needed to change themes, every time I did, it would mess up the entire website. I think I tried a solid eight themes, all of which looked worse than this one. I tried implementing custom CSS, but it did not work. I checked my code multiple times and even copied/pasted some of the CSS from my commerce site that I know works into this template to see if it would make any difference. It did not. I did keep some non-working CSS in the site editor so you can see what I was going for/that I know how to do it. I, unfortunately, chose this theme way too late into the process to reach out for help, but I would love to come into office hours in the future and learn where I went wrong on this theme or how I could have improved it.
Despite all of the things I hate about this content website, there are some cool features I am proud of! I like how the pictures look on mobile and tablet, and I am proud that I made the time to fully flesh out all of my stories (on ChatGPT, at least). Also, I think it’s cool that I expanded on the idea I used from my last project for this one. I also incorporated a plug-in called “Contact Form 7” to create a contact form for my blog users. I promise I really did try with this website, but it did not try with me. For reference, all writing from this site besides the reflection came from ChatGPT.