My first professional web development project, Game Wisdom, is a redesign creating a new custom WordPress theme for an existing game design analysis blog site. The original theme was over 10 years old, and had become outdated, confusing, and cluttered over the years as more plugins were added. The challenge here was to present over 10 years worth of existing content in a more modern and user friendly manner.

I created the new Game Wisdom WordPress theme using traditional WordPress PHP to provide up-to-date content as new articles are added by the user through a WordPress editor. The styles were handled using SASS compiling, and scripting was handled with both vanilla JavaScript, and jQuery. Advanced Custom Fields Pro (ACF Pro) was used to handle custom content that otherwise couldn’t be natively added within the existing WordPress editor.

The front page hero contains a full-windowed carousel slider that adjusts to screen-size. The carousel was created using Slick slider, and features up to 3 articles at a time. The navigation is handled through a hamburger menu that slides in from the left at desktop sizes, and from the top at mobile sizes. The hamburger itself has a CSS-based animation where it toggles between 3 lines and an “x”. When Game Wisdom is streaming on YouTube, a small yellow informational banner that can be dismissed displays at the top of the page, letting users know they can watch the stream.