I started with my News site first because I figured that would be the easier of the two, but It turns out the template I used had minimal functionality, making my job much harder. Once the Honorable Professor Weatherford pointed out that not all themes are created equal, I put the news site on pause and moved over to e-commerce.
I modeled my commerce site after the GAP webpage, and after all the years of looking at it, I never actually realized it is a mixture of web text and images with text applied in Illustrator. My commerce WordPress theme had many more options and was much easier to use. These options made the layout easy as it had sliders to move columns and images, color pickers, font awesome, and font type and size controls. One of the downsides with the free option is that I needed a dropdown menu for the product. Unfortunately, that feature is only available in the pro version.
After my success with the E-Commerce theme, I decided to change my news site theme mid-build. I finally found a stock theme that allowed a little more freedom and delivered a professional look. After cranking out new content, I realized that there were six free plugins I could have been using the entire time that would have allowed much more customization with the free version. The main issue I had with all versions of the news site was I couldn't figure out how to use the post page more than once. All of my posts were clean and organized, but whenever I had a menu linking to a new section, It would only allow me to connect to a static page. I'm pretty confident this was a beginner's error.
Lets go to my Commerce Site
Lets go to my News Site