In February 2016, I began building my personal website and blog. I bought a domain name and hosting. I drew detailed sitemaps. I took a Lynda.com course on WordPress. I was ready to get down to business. Little did I know that it would take me almost two years to finish the site.
I was not sitting around, twiddling my fingers during those two years. Let me tell you about four of the biggest reasons for the delay.
1. I flip-flopped on the number of sites I wanted.
I couldn’t decide whether my blog should be a part of my main site (“brittanygervin.com”) or a separate site. Every time I set things up one way, something would change my mind about the arrangement.
At first, I went with a single site. It seemed like the easiest setup for a newbie to implement, a one-stop shop. That impression quickly died. I couldn’t think of a good way to integrate the blog into the main site. My site didn’t have a sidebar, which meant I had no place to show blog-related elements like recent posts, categories, and archives. Programming the footer widgets to show those items on blog pages proved to be an unpredictable, and ultimately unsuccessful, tactic.
So, I decided to host my blog on my newly created “blog.brittanygervin.com” subdomain. I had to carefully plan everything. On the main site, I linked to the blog’s subdomain in the menu. On the blog, I added an About the Blog blurb in the footer that linked to my main site. The Contact link in the blog menu linked to the same page on my main site. The arrangement worked well…until circumstances changed again.
In November 2017, I bought an SSL certificate for my site (thanks to an awesome Black Friday sale from Namecheap, my site’s host). Unfortunately, the certificate only covered “brittanygervin.com.” I couldn’t afford a second certificate for my subdomain, and I couldn’t stomach having a half-secured site. Before I got too deep into merging the blog back into the main site, however, I thought of a better solution: host it on WordPress.com. All was fine…until I saw my blog from a visitor’s perspective for the first time.
I knew there were going to be ads because I was using WordPress.com’s free tier. Fine. Fair trade. But I wasn’t expecting them to be so prominent or awful. Right in the middle of my homepage were two ads almost as big as my featured image, one of a raw hamburger patty and another one about license plates. The worst ad of all showed an illustration of a woman pulling on her own belly fat. I didn’t want to see that on my blog, period. And what if the next batch of ads were even worse? Nope, it wasn’t going down like that.
For the millionth and final time, I merged my blog back into my main site. I was bummed that I didn’t get my separate sites, but everything worked out well in the end.
2. I was picky about my WordPress theme.
Mariah had a vision of love. Well, I had a vision of my site, and none of the themes I found fit it. No matter how great a theme looked, there was always a deal breaker waiting in the wings. The numerous lists of potential themes in my work notebooks evince my never-ending cycle of browse-install-reject.
For a time, I settled on the wonderful Sparkling theme. Once I had applied my color scheme, arranged my blog widgets, and added my social media links, the site had looked kissing close to my vision. But the WordPress portfolio shortcode I used to set up my Projects and Writing pages had displayed the pieces as a list; I wanted a grid. I didn’t know enough CSS to change the arrangement, and I couldn’t find a plugin to change it either. Hello, deal breaker!
I ended up using the Sela theme. Sela looked similar to Sparkling, and it included a grid template for my portfolio pages. Sela wasn’t as easy to tweak as Sparkling by default, but there was a detailed Sela demo site with set-up instructions available. Vision achieved!
3. My featured images wouldn’t cooperate.
Working with featured images on my site was a nightmare. I spent more time working through this issue than any other.
My initial challenge was selecting featured images for my Bio and Resume pages. It wasn’t immediately obvious what I should use. Borrowing a technique I’d seen on other websites, I created simple graphics in Canva that showed the page’s title (in white text) against a plain background (dark puce). The graphics didn’t work out. Having a giant title on the image and a normal-sized title before the text looked redundant on my site. I kept searching.
The second challenge was making my chosen images fit within the recommended dimensions for Sela’s featured images. Nothing fit or looked right. I accidentally discovered that images bigger than the recommended dimensions scale perfectly on their own, which helped me narrow my image search considerably until I found the best candidates for each page.
My workaround fizzled when I began adapting Sela for my blog. Sela’s blog pages are formatted differently than its regular pages. None of my images fit the new recommended dimensions. A huge gray space extended from the area where my images stopped. A feature of the theme—a white rectangle that intersected the image and enclosed the post title—bothered me even more. I needed a new solution.
I found promising instructions from First Site Guide. The article suggested using a plugin to adjust the featured image size. It worked. My images definitely looked better. But I wasn’t sure which image presets to change, or what dimensions to change them to. I was just plugging in random numbers to see what would happen. And that white rectangle was still there!
A WordPress discussion thread provided a better solution: copy/paste the HTML image code from my post into the excerpt box. That way, the images appeared in my homepage excerpts perfectly—no gray space, no white rectangle. I couldn’t set a featured image for my posts, but that was okay.
4. I couldn’t settle on a homepage design.
One of my final battles was designing my main site’s homepage. It went through several iterations before I landed on the right look.
In another attempt to customize Sela for my site, I refused to adhere to the theme’s homepage template. I skipped the featured image beneath the navigation bar, instead filling that blank space with a short hello message, a picture of myself, and later, links to my social media accounts and my NaNoWriMo badges. I experimented with different sizes and alignments for the photos and text, but the elements tended to shift unexpectedly and unattractively on the mobile site. On top of that, I couldn’t decide how many front page widgets to display. Sometimes I had none; other times I had six. It was a mess.
Eventually, I stopped fighting the template. On a whim, I set an image of my beloved solar figurines as a background header…and it looked great. Then I added front page widgets for my picture, a featured blog post, and a recent project. I made sure the images were the same size (thanks again to Canva) and linked to the appropriate pages. Sometimes the default template works just fine.
Conclusion
I’m proud of how my site turned out. There were many migraines and much frustration along the way, but I learned about so many new things. It was a fun experience.
My only regret was that it took so long to complete my site. Fortunately, words from a WPMU DEV article I read changed my perspective on the situation: “The fact of the matter is that no website worth its hosting was set up in minutes, or even a few hours.” That sentence completely eliminated my guilt and made me appreciate what I had accomplished.
I hope you enjoy my site!