When I initially built this website, I designed it using Adobe XD in such a way where my projects would have a short description along with a link to the project. However, in practice, this proved to be a bad idea – with only limited descriptions I was selling myself short on the work I’ve done. Creating more detailed posts would help profile my projects more in-depth, and expanding the projects page from a PHP file into a full WordPress installation made perfect sense.

The process itself was quite simple – WordPress installs take only a few minutes at most. Taking a blank underscores theme and implementing my site within it.. that was more of a challenge. I commented every template part and every page with the page name at its starting and ending points to see what code needed to go where, and before long, the site took shape as a theme. This, however, doesn’t unlock the full capability of what WordPress could do for me.

Enter the plugins – specifically Advanced Custom Fields. Once this was installed I added new header images and required links to GitHub repos and for the actual project page itself. I also installed the Font Awesome WordPress plugin and configured it to customize the post icon to the left side of the body text on larger screens, as well as provide a default icon option if desired.

WordPress also allowed me to categorize the posts in a very easy fashion. A later update of my personal website’s main page will allow any visitor to see my projects based on categories such as JavaScript, WordPress, React etc. – just by clicking those links to those categories on the main index page which WordPress has already set up for me.

The WordPress install at https://gregrasmussen.com/projects is no longer being updated, as I have migrated everything to the current site. Please continue to visit my current site at https://gregrasmussen.com/portfolio for up-to-date information on projects I’ve been putting out!