Final Project

This has definitely been a whirlwind! I didn't think it was possible to learn so much in such a short amount of time (and celebrate two big holidays). This course has shown me that it is very easy to get a website up and running. Will that website look good? Probably not initially, but you can work on that over time.

I've learned that there is really no excuse for a business to not have a website. Web building is affordable (for the most part) and fairly easy to do. I found WordPress to be PRETTY easy to use, but I spent a lot of time researching different plugins and tools. When I was in college, I had to maintain a WordPress blog. Had I not done that, it would have been a lot harder for me to use.

After this course, I plan on taking what I learned/achieved and applying it to my Dad's actual bakery website. I know how to do a lot of basic things to clean it up. I may ask a graphic designer to help me with some of the creative, though.

I also plan on taking another class - maybe more hands on. I learn best through repetition and tutorials. It is hard to learn when you aren't in a classroom setting. This course made me realize how hard it can be to learn and focus on work at the same time. It was an amazing introductory to hopefully more classes to come!

My webpage still needs a lot of work. I couldn't figure out why my social links won't click through and how to get the slideshow off every page. I tried different plugins, but couldn't get it to work. On my gallery slide, I tried to create tables for the images to sit in, but WordPress only lets you edit the HTML so much. This is one of the times I didn't like WordPress because I couldn't change the format. I knew exactly how I wanted it to look, but felt stuck.

For my page, I included an About Us, Contact Us, Gallery, Cupcakes, Cakes, and Order Form. If this site was going to launch, I would have purchased the premium version of some of the plugins so their logos wouldn't be showing. The Order Form doesn't work entirely since I did not input all my merchant/account info, but it is a start!

Getting the site registered with various search engines has helped a lot. I noticed if I type in certain keywords - it pops up on Google! I was so excited to see this.