Ask HN: Web dev learner here. How can I improve look and feel of this website? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Web dev learner here. How can I improve look and feel of this website?

1 pointgodelmachine8 comments

Hi folks,

I ask this question here only because I hold HNer's in high regard.

I am a novice to Web Development and am creating a website for a school pro bono. The hosting provider GoDaddy & am building this on WordPress. I am really interested in improving the look and feel of this website, however, I find that my development abilities would be very limited if I rely solely on WordPress. During the learning & building, I realized that we need to have CSS & HTML skills as well, but unfortunately, my CSS & HTML skills are next to nought.

Would someone please advise me on the way ahead? I did independent research of my own and came across terms like Parallax Scrolling, wherein one light / transparent background image static and the readable/ useful contents of the website can be scrolled/ navigated through. Also, I would like to add image sliders and sleek, seamless animations. The browsing should appear fluid to the user. How can I reach that level?

Any website or tutorial that will enable me to design a captivating, mesmerizing look and feel of the website?

Any feedback would be highly appreciated.

Thanks in advance :)

Memento Mori.

PS: This is the website I am working on - http://www.jaihindjuniorcollege.com/

It looks like you have put together the content and navigation well. Wordpress' solution for your challenge is to use 'themes'. A Wordpress theme is a unified package of predesigned and optimized HTML, CSS, JS, and images. There are thousands of free and low cost themes to match every look and feel you may want to achieve. Themes rarely are 100% perfect for your needs; some themes provide customization tools that don't require any code, others may need some HTML/CSS work. It is highly recommended that you first get yourself a local development copy of Wordpress, that way you can make changes on your computer and test them before pushing those changes to GoDaddy and the rest of the internet.

I recommend this is a good place to get started with a local development system: https://local.getflywheel.com/ Once that is in place, start looking for themes on here: https://wordpress.org/themes/ - These should all be free. If nothing works there I would head over to ThemeForest.net for commercial themes which are more fully featured.

Hey Reilly,

Thanks for taking interest in my question.

Yes, I am already using a theme called Ascension. I also got in touch with the developers on GitHub whenever I wanted to make any changes, but they could do only so much.

I am looking to achieve something on the lines of https://drexel.edu/

Merci beaucoup! :)

That is a beautiful site with really excellent photography. You could achieve a similar effect with a plugin like this: https://wordpress.org/plugins/unlimited-background-slider/ I would recommend careful selection of photos if you are going to make them large background images so their colors work against the text that it is behind, and that they look good at all resolutions otherwise it is more distracting than its worth.

Thanks for the plugin, matey :)

Please don't mind if I ask you two small, opinion based questions.

1) Is WordPress based development all about using the right plugins?

2) Is it possible to make a website like Drexel Univ's purely using WordPress?

Many thanks for you response _/\_

1. Plugins are risky in the long run, each one is maintained at varying levels of security and upkeep. I would recommend sticking with plugins that have a large community and have been recently updated.

2. There is nothing that you can't achieve with Wordpress with the right amount of time and investment. For a site like Drexel.edu there is possibly dozens of people working on design, coding, photography, testing, etc. Being able to make a fully custom WordPress site relies upon skill in HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP, as well as WordPress internals. With those skills, some of the largest companies in the world have used WordPress to power their blogs or entire sites: https://humanmade.com/ has some great examples.

There is no easy solution to having a highly-customized WordPress site- either find a theme that can customize everything for you without code, or find an experienced developer that can help realize your vision (perhaps for free, probably not!), or become an experienced WordPress developer, which is not an easy road but a rewarding one.

Google provides many tools to test your website :

https://web.dev/?ref=hackernews

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?hl=f...

Thanks for these links. But more than this, I am looking forward to designing beautiful and captivating websites. Would like to have some lessons on that.

n-gate.com

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