Christina Truong | Web Developer

New christinatruong.com!

After 6 months of working on revamping this site, it’s finally done! Well not really, but done enough. More like a soft launch. One of the perks and drawbacks of working on your own site is there is no one to tell you what to do or when to stop.

The first step was to finally design a logo for myself. I was starting to feel like a shoemaker with no shoes. I also decided to move the entire site into WordPress instead of just the blog so I could display my work samples similar to a blog post rather than trying to squish all the details on one page. I had also designed the site mockups to be responsive and mobile friendly.

Initially, I used a very basic, bare bones theme and customized it by creating a child theme. But after creating a couple custom post types and templates and a couple headaches later, it seemed a better idea to just write my own theme. So it was back to the drawing board and a lot of reading through the WordPress Codex. Also, as I was building it out, I just didn’t like how the footer looked once it was on an actual web page and went back to the designs and made significant changes to the footer area and as well as other smaller design tweaks many, many times.

Most of my experience has been with front-end development so it took some time to get used to writing PHP and doing stuff with databases. I spent an hour thinking that I was doing something wrong when I was moving the database from my local environment to the live site and it turned out to be just the wrong password. Womp womp.

I was getting really tired of my previous site; everytime I looked at it I wanted to puke. So even though this site isn’t as done as I’d like it to be, I decided it was time to launch it and add enhancements later. If I didn’t do it soon, I’d probably start itching to redesign it again!