Paint Place

The Paint Place

For the past couple of weeks, I have been hard at work on a large project. In Wordpress, we needed to make our own website from scratch using a fresh download of Wordpress, using a customized theme and an original logo.

The Front Page

Logo 

For my logo, I started with this.

When I was brainstorming for ideas for a logo, I knew we needed to make a formal-ish logo for a formal-ish website, so I instinctively thought of Times as a font. But, everyone else does the same thing, and thus there are thousands of "formal" things that are in times new roman- it's become rather generic. So I figured I could make it unique from everything else while keeping the font. I thought about using paint chips, and viola, I'm using times new roman without being a copycat. From there, after peer suggestions, I re-aligned the words, removed the background, and came up with the final product.

Theme 

For my theme, I looked on wordpress for themes that used dark colors (to bring the color out of the logo) and when I found something I was happy with I created a child theme with it- in simple terms, I set-up my theme to have specific parts overwritten even if the theme is updated, without messing with the original theme. With a few modifications in order, including a new header (featuring the logo) and a new background (again, to bring the color out) I am very happy with the final product.

Front Page

Our front page needed to feature various posts for tips and tricks with painting (which was a problem for me since I didn't really know how painting needed any instructions) and a main post that was "sticky", or non-changing. With some (a lot of) obvious corner cutting, I managed to achieve the requirements.

The Pages

Store Location 

In a lapse of any ideas, I decided to go with humor rather then legitimate content. There isn't much else to say about this page other than I don't really know what else I could have put in here.

Brands 

For brands, rather then create multiple custom brands I decided to go with more humor and rely on some obvious fake and terrible clip art for "brands". With more copying and pasting for the illusion of legit content, of course.

Colors 

I didn't (and still don't) know how to name all the various colors of paint you could buy from anywhere, so I screen capped the page for HTML colors on w3schools for paints.

Inspiration 

The (regrettably) only page with some full, legit, content, I used stock photo websites featured in my previous blog post to grab pictures of rooms and file them into categories and galleries for display.

There are quite a few more galleries actually featured, but I think putting all of them here would be rather redundant, as they all follow the template presented above. I got the idea for doing "inspiration" like this from various other paint store websites with similar ideas, but without the formatting/amount of pictures. I think this works perfect for the tools I have available to me.

Learning Center

For the learning center I, to be perfectly honest, copied word for word content from a webpage for "painting for beginners" and then set all of the text as a link to that website (evading copyright laws like a boss) with some silly clip-art pictures added for effect. This way I also had pictures on each page of the website.

Conclusion 

(whoa! professional-y! scary!!)

Overall, if you ignore all of the fake content, I feel very happy and proud of what I have created. Something I will definitely take away from this is that I spent so much time on the webpages with the most original content and it really doesn't look like a lot of time was spent, so I should focus on perhaps making it half fake and half real for class projects that require content. This way I spend far less time and all pages look like they have an equal amount of content. If I had to make something similar I think I would focus more on finding a good theme to customize, and then do far more customization on it, to make it nice and unique. I would use a similar idea for the logo though; specifically, putting it in the middle of a header image and then putting complimentary graphics on the sides. I think that the content took the longest, and the theme was the quickest to get and adjust to make it better.

Real or Hoax, Web Design

This is something that was supposed to be done a few months ago, and I ran out of time and just left this on my blog as a draft for the past few months. I have decided since I likely won't ever finish it I may as well publish it so you can see what I had done. So, y'know, while looking at this keep in mind it is NOT done and so probably won't look as good as everything else.

We spent time making a layout for this website, in order to give it a little more dynamic in comparison to past websites with the side bar and what not. The colors were up to us, and I am very happy with the colors that I picked for all of it.
Process
We started off with the layout as mentioned but the CSS itself and the design was up to us, I.E. whether or not to have the menu on the left or the right. I made a layout to copy off of and just renamed each page and changed the content to match what was needed.
Learning (yaay)
I learned that CSS is an amazing thing. No but really, we had so much CSS that it would have been a nightmare to make it for every single page and manage other things in the same code because it would have been super cluttered. But also, with CSS I learned that you can make codes more specific then others, for example I used #sidebar ul li a:hover just for the links in the sidebar, rather then having all links filed under a:hover, because then any links used would have the same format, and would thus look really out of place.