The first changes made to my website came about from personal color preference above all others. I set my theme to grey and blue but feel as if it didn’t make a comprehensive connection to the title of my site (Green Eggs and Sam). In attempts to streamline the menu process to highlight my final project, I added a variety of primary menu posts. This has resulted in a comprehensive top menu for the pages containing my final project posts. This has been undoubtedly the most time consuming portion of my site edits given that it took research in the menu tutorials to set it up the way that I chose to do.
Additional changes included the attempts to add a real-time scrolling stock market ticker (such as image below).
I was met with quite exorbitant pushback from the WordPress platform in this regard as it has strict guidelines for structure and additions being almost exclusively in Blog style format. This was almost as upsetting as my inability to program the dang thing myself in a manner that would organize the site the way I would’ve liked.
My original expectations for the site were to have a uniform platform that created a unique compilation of a variety of online media sources that I interact with. For example, my first hopes were to be able to add a ticker function for financial markets such as above to increase the spatial ability of the platform. However, without the structural ability to do this, I chose to incorporate these themes into my commentary of News Responses from The Economist over the course of the semester. Another goal was to streamline the ability of users to navigate my final project posts. This was a much more realistic goal given the tools available on WordPress.
These goals were moderately difficult but I feel that I’ve done the best to my ability in terms of reaching these goals with the WordPress software provided. I do feel like there was an unnecessary difficulty with formatting content on the page that would conform to any standard BUT those of a personal blog site.
Making a website using WordPress was a surprisingly challenging process relative to my expectations. Having completed some web design in the past, I felt as if I would be in good standing for the formatting of the site but I still struggled to tweak it EXACTLY the way I wanted it. This frustration was remedied of course by the implementation of egg puns on nearly every News Response post.
I then hope to utilize this WordPress as a reference point to move the Cashy app even further should I decide to move forward in its development. I envision the Green Eggs and Sam page becoming an App update page in addition to supportive media space for the application
The beauty of standardized blog sites such as WordPress is that it makes the process of content sharing exponentially easier than in times past (think creation of your own website with a web developer, content creation and translation, then posting occasionally). This has helped me understand the adaptive nature of digital media to what the users need. With a somewhat flooded market of bloggers, digital platforms used to assist in this space are booming. Blogging also instilled in me the concept of free knowledge. We paid an aggregate $0 for access to the site and its features which allowed us to coin a domain of our own AND a space to publish a creative series upon. I think this represents a larger conflict in digital media today, one that is gradually diminishing, that digital media in all forms should be used as a reference point to collaborate, share, and create a narrative of any sort.
Green Eggs & Sam 