Game Dev in Progress… Day 2
Hello again, my name is Cristian Aspacio and this is day 2 of becoming a Game Developer. Day 2 is a little bit more action packed then Day 1. The program requires me to create a portfolio website in order to show off my skills for potential employers in the future. I decided to use Wordpress because of its intuitive design and also it’s free. I know the hardships of making a website purely using HTML and CSS so using Wordpress should be easier right? And yes it absolutely is.
As a computer science major, one of the many things that I did for projects was to create websites. And there is all sort of ways you can make it. You can use pure HTML with CSS, using CSS frameworks such as Bootstrap or Semantic UI, web frameworks such as Angular and Django, and any combination of these. So when I heard that we needed to create a website, I started to get a bit nervous. However, that feeling has passed when I started using Wordpress.
At first, it was a lot to take in. Like diving head long into an abyss, I didn’t know where I was going. The introduction to my Wordpress adventure was trying to figure out how to host my website. I looked at all different site such as Bluehost and GoDaddy. Some of this hosting sites were already fined tuned for using Wordpress. The only downside was paying for it. I decided to go with a cheap plan on Dreamhost.com. The next step was figuring out all the aspects of Wordpress. And there is a lot of aspects….
Wordpress’s UI is pretty intuitive and easy to understand. When you first open it up, it shows you the Dashboard. It gives you basic run down of all the plugins you have installed, how to change different components in your website such as pages and choosing a theme. Now I didn’t know this before but Dreamhost pre-installed some plug-ins for me, which cluttered the Dashboard a bit. Being me and wanting to start from scratch, I decided to uninstall the plug-ins and installed new ones that I wanted instead. These plug-ins is the reason why its so easy to build in Wordpress.
The plug-ins that I used are Starter Templates and Elementor. Starter Templates allows me to use an archive of templates made available and Elementor is website builder that is easy to use and understand. I selected a theme I wanted. If I didn’t like the webpage, I just dragged and dropped another webpage from a total different theme template. Then I could just edit using Elementor by dragging and dropping different components inside the pages, or I could simply remove them or move them in a different spot in the page. What I could do in pure HTML/CSS in an day, I could in Wordpress in a minute. It was very mesmerizing.
This is just another example of how new technologies can change the game so drastically and that we should all be open into trying them. I wish I could have convinced my professors to use Wordpress instead of using HTML/CSS. Thank you for reading and I’ll cya guys next time.
