I uploaded the new version of my website over the weekend. There are still a couple of things to do with it (dozens of alt texts, the menu button on mobile isn’t displaying properly, etc). But, it’s a lot easier to keep updated, which is one of the things I wanted to do this year.
About the Rebuild—Short Version: Old site was pure code. Took forever to update. New site is built with WordPress. Easier to update. Yay!
About the Rebuild—Long Version (lol)
Version 1.0 was originally built with WordPress, but at the time, the design limitations of themes and builders drove me up the wall. Eventually, I built version 2.0 with Webflow, a no-code site builder I was using for work at the time, then exported the resulting code and uploaded that to my website host. However, the code was tedious to keep updated. I wound up letting the site stagnate, which wasn’t noticeable since throughout 2023, I was mostly on hiatus from many of my projects due to life stress.
One of my “To-Do” list items for 2024 is to keep my site updated. I’ve been experiencing some traffic elsewhere that points back to this website, but the site itself was outdated. I also plan on releasing new books and adding those books would be a pain to add to the code manually. The portfolio was outdated, but I didn’t want to create thumbnails for dozens of new artwork.
I’d been getting more comfortable building with WordPress over the last five months or so. I’ve converted a Bootstrap template to a functioning WordPress template, built a template from scratch (the Sacchi blog), and converted a simple Grapes.js landing page build into a WordPress theme. I felt comfortable enough to build my site’s version 3.0 with WordPress. To save my sanity, I heavily customized a free theme that already had responsive design built into it.
Now the site will be easy to keep updated! And, now visitors can know more about whether commissions are open, where I am on my latest book, and my current social media links.
The hilarious thing is that as I type this, I just realized…my commission prices aren’t on the site. 🤣 I’ll have to get on that this week, LOL……
Anyway, you visit the new SaccharineLemons.com website and check it out! I’m off to go add that pricing…