The Assignment:

Last year Crystal started making her art a full time career. She was generating over a dozen full size original artworks every month and needed a place to be able to show them to people who were interested. I told her I could make her a basic gallery website where she could upload her art and have it there for anybody to see. I decided the best way I could do this quickly was to use WordPress. WordPress is a fully functional cms that lets you build a live website within a visual editor and for most basic sites gives you enough flexibility to work pretty well.

They say you don’t need to know code to build a site in WordPress but I can tell you it helps a lot. WordPress uses a kind of block approach where you can set styles and content per block to make them look basically the way you want. It is very quick and very easy, but if you are like me, you will wind up getting into the code to customize things the way you want beyond the options that are offered in the main visual editor.

Crystal’s site followed WordPress convention mostly but I did have to write some custom code to make the detail pages and the lightbox to work the way I wanted. Still, I spent maybe two weeks on the site which is at least half the time it would have taken in PHP or Django.