I am pleased to announce this latest iteration of Websiteandsound.com, now a WordPress creation based on the excellent and free Astrid theme. This breaks the long-standing tradition of using this site as a hand-coding playground for myself, opting instead to allow me more time to focus on my clients’ projects, and assure that my portfolio can be maintained in a familiar, responsive interface. Especially considering that the client sites featured in this portfolio will always eclipse what functionality I would provide here, and my hosting company will manage backups and keep the core engine updated automatically, it makes sense to allow me to now focus on quality content. Essentially, I am now my own client, and I want the most functionality with as little effort as possible!
Fellow programmers and code geeks, take heart, I have not completely kept my coding skills on the back-burner for this release. The theme has been heavily customized with my own Photoshop, CSS and jQuery work. For those WordPress enthusiasts who are interested, instead of editing the theme directly, or even using a child theme, I opted to use two simple plugins which allow me to freely add CSS and Javascript code independently of any theme or plugin. This solves problems with plugin JS/CSS overriding child theme code, and allows me to keep my custom code even when I change themes.
The portfolio section is, of course, the most important, and uses the most customization. I wanted this section to be as intuitive and navigable as possible, and no theme or plugin that I found (so far) could do what I wanted out of the box.
This post, itself, also marks a first for Websiteandsound.com, being its first official Blog entry! I look forward to using this feature (what WordPress was designed for to begin with), and will be adding reports on various interests, including programming, as well as my experiments with music, power-lifting, gardening, and whatever else might inspire me.