I began with my News site first because I assumed it would be the easier of the two, but it turned out that the template I used had limited functionality, making my job much more difficult. When the Honorable Professor Weatherford pointed out that not all themes are created equal, I paused the news site and switched to e-commerce.
I modeled my E-Commerce site after the GAP webpage, and after years of staring at it, I never realized it is a combination of web text and images with text applied in Illustrator. My E-Commerce WordPress theme had a lot more options and was a lot simpler to use. With sliders to move columns and images, color pickers, font awesome, and font type and size controls, these options made the layout simple. One disadvantage of the free option was that I needed a dropdown menu for the product. Regrettably, this feature is only available in the pro version.
What did I learn
Following my success with the E-Commerce theme, I decided to change the theme of my news site in the middle of the build. I finally found a stock theme that gave me a little more leeway while still delivering a professional look. After churning out new content for a while, I realized there were six free plugins I could have been using the entire time that would have allowed for far more customization with the free version. My main problem with all versions of the news site was that I couldn’t figure out how to use the post page more than once. My posts were all clean and well-organized, but whenever I had a menu linking to a new section, it would only connect to a static page. I’m pretty sure this was a rookie mistake.
See for yourself
http://ryanfernandezdesign.com/nmi/Production/project-three/