Week 34

Create your own WordPress theme and then customise it. Add the hacks mentioned in the lesson CMS and WordPress part 3. Do some research on the Internet and find two more hacks and implement it on your site.

For this week’s learning activity I decided to create a child theme from an already existing WordPress theme. I created a WordPress site in one.com through 1-clic installation and chose the Twenty Nineteen theme. Since I was going to make only a few changes, I decided to work directly in one.com. I followed the LinkedIn tutorial WordPress: Building Child Themes by Patrick Rauland.

First, I edited the child’s style.css and changed the background colour as suggested in the tutorial.

After that I played around editing in the browser and changed background colours, text size and style…

Then I added a favicon to my site following the instructions on this weeks lesson. Although the parent theme I chose allows to add a favicon, I decided to try and do it by adding it to the functions.php file to see if it worked. It did. Now I know I can change the WordPress icon to the one I choose even when the selected theme doesn’t give me the option.

I changed a few more details in the Customise section. The theme I picked doesn’t allow too many changes, so I only added a menu, two extra pages and changed the colour of the links to deep red.

Finally, I added a screenshot for the preview of the child theme.

Week 33

Take your theme that you have installed on your hosting account and customise it as per this module. Then I want you to find some WordPress hacks that you can use to customise your website even further. The main thing with this project is to not just do things for the sake of doing them. I would like you to explain the tweaks that you have made and your reasoning for adding certain features.

When creating my portfolio in week 32, I also added 4 posts, an about page and played around with the options to customize it. Below I list those changes and the new ones I made this week.

• I changed some general settings such as title and tagline, site language, timezone, date format (d/m/Y) and time format (H:i).
• I changed comment settings so no one can comment. Since it is a portfolio and there is a contact form available, I preferred to disable this option.
• I changed the permalinks to use post name instead of the default one. It is more search engine friendly and gives the reader an idea of what the post is about.
• I installed the WPS Hide Login plugin to protect my website by changing the login URL and preventing access to the wp-login.php page and the wp-admin directory to non-connected people.
• Added a gravatar.
• I uploaded a logo and a site icon.
• I changed the number of columns in the post grid on desktop to three.
• I added a contact form to my About page. For that, I installed the Ninja Forms plugins.
• I added additional CSS in order to change the look of the navigation menu. The menu items were underlined and I changed it so they appear without decoration except on hover.
  This is the CSS code I added:
  .alt-nav a {text-decoration: none;}
.alt-nav a:hover {text-decoration: underline ;}
• Also adding additional CSS, I removed the left padding in the about page, so the photo and text are centered.
  .resume-template .entry-content {max-width: 500px; padding-left: 0;}
• Finally, I edited the file footer.php to change the hypelink text from the blog name to my name.

Here is a link to my portfolio.

Week 31

PART A
Consider the touchpoints of your brand in general (to ensure that all the elements work together) and then focus on your packaging. Design a set of Point of Sale elements that will promote your product in-store. The set can consist of however many elements you choose. It can be in any format that you would like it to be. Please consider the following:

1. Can customers clearly see your product in your Point of Sale elements?
Do you use your Point of Sale to also showcase your actual product?
2. Brand Integration. Does it integrate with the brand’s look and feel?
3. Designed to sell! Does it persuade customers to buy your product?

The Point of Sale I designed is a cardboard box with shelves to showcase the actual product. Its design integrates with the brand’s look and feel since it uses the same colours, shapes and photo. The logo is clearly visible, as is the byline. It is meant to be positioned at the end of a pet food supermarket aisle to persuade dog owners to buy the product.

PART B
Brand manual.
Take pictures of your elements and include them in a presentation of your brand called a brand manual or a design manual. Your brand manual should have a minimum of 7 pages and include logo, color scheme and chosen typography as well as the different elements produced during this 4 week project period (brochure, infographic, packaging, point of sale). 
Hand in your brand manual as a PDF.