A lot has gone on in the past few months!
I’ve had a few different projects launch since the last time I wrote. One was a children’s furniture website, Art For Kids. My role was to create a theme for it in BigCommerce. It was my second experience doing a BigCommerce theme and while in some ways it almost felt like it was overkill with the number of different files I could edit, it was amazing compared to a different eCommerce platform I’d done development for, so overall it was a positive experience. I also have some good memories working on that website since I started development on it when I was pregnant with my daughter!
Also in November, we saw the launch of the Pfister REACT landing page. It’s the first time there’s been a newspaper article about something I was working on since I’ve stopped working at an actual newspaper, so that is kind of cool even though of course the product itself is the feature of the story. This was my first time dealing with video where we weren’t going to just include a bunch of YouTube embeds, and it was a lot of fun learning about different video formats and facing challenges getting the video to work on a variety of different devices and browsers. I worked on the main landing page while a coworker of mine took on the additional content pages.
Late last month another project I was working on for Pfister launched – the responsive version of their main site. This was an interesting challenge since for the most part the markup was not going to be changing from the version my company first built for them back in 2012. There were a lot of choices (and some shortcuts) we made back then that I was suddenly wishing I could have taken back! That said though, it was a good challenge and definitely taught me a lot. I got a lesson about making things I build more future-friendly (though in the past 3 years since we first built this site I definitely made great improvements in that area) and just in general for adjusting existing pages to be mobile-friendly.
There’s other projects going on now that I can’t talk about just yet, but I’m really excited about all of them. The last thing that I can mention is that I gave myself a challenge at the beginning of the year to do one cool web related thing a week for the year. I’ve technically already fallen behind on my list (I’ve only completed two items and per the schedule should have done at least four and almost five) but I’ve also forgiven myself since I have still been working on web related items pretty regularly, and my list wasn’t at 52 yet anyway. I’ll probably end up padding that list with some of the items I’ve been working on the past few weeks, and also work on removing scope from some of those existing 30-some items to make each task easier to complete in the span of a week.
I’m trying to make this the Year I Finish Projects. I have three projects going on that I have to finish, one in the next month and another in the next few months. Two personal projects I’d really like to complete are my personal website redesign (because this thing is OLD and why is my blog font so tiny?!) and the website for my World of Warcraft guild… but we’ll see how I do on my list of less-than-52 things! Which someday will also be accessible on the web and not just my computer.