While I’ve failed a lot, I’ve also had some wins.  I thought I’d share 3 of the sites I’ve built and a bit about each one. After learning a bit about HTML and CSS, I dove in and starting trying building sites.  The first few I built, I look back on now with a bit of embarrassment, but as with most things, things have continued to improve.

Gray Dot Catalyst was quite a simple site for a consultant requiring a basic update and bringing in the ability to upload and download documents and having a ‘spinning’ carousel of clients. The site construction was straightforward, but enabling document uploads to work proved a bit challenging.

Vital Connections was a more intriguing site where I learned a lot about design, user flow, and working with WordPress.  It was also the first site where I tried to provide the client with a basic ‘how-to’ document, which taught me a lot about how to do this better.

Anne-Sophie Alitch was a business coaching site.  This was a super interesting site to build, not only as I continued to build on learning about WordPress, design, photos, and the ‘how-to’ document.  The site needed to be in English and French and required various drop-down slider functionality that I had never done before.  Also, the client wanted to learn how to do most things herself so I would figure out how to do things on my own and then we sat together building her site.  A completely new experience and even though I failed to figure out incorporate custom javascript into WordPress, it was a very rewarding experience.

Even after a number of months of doing this now, one of the things I continue to struggle with is design.  Clients seem to come in two forms – one’s who have a clear idea in their head about what they want their site to look like and the others are those who have very little idea.  Getting the ideas out of their heads and into a design is hard; it’s a big iterative process with lots of back and forth.  Hopefully over time, I’ll figure out how to do this better and ideally faster.