As designers and developers grow their skill set, it's natural to want to implement new techniques and ways to do things in our own personal projects. I have learned a lot in a short period of time about web development in WordPress and was very eager to shift the direction I was going as a freelancer, especially in my website.

This project, among many others, was why my blog was so empty as of late. My goal is to write a couple of blog posts a month now that I have a little more time on my hands. I also want to develop a system to get some of my Twitter friends to write a blog post or two throughout the year to get their knowledge and expertise. So if you are interested at the moment, go ahead and contact me! I would love to have you as a guest writer!

Why I Redesigned My Website

One of the first steps I wanted to take with all of this newfound knowledge throughout the past few months was to redesign my website. Obviously, this is the first thing most of my clients see before hiring me for their design projects and I wanted to keep them up-to-date on what my capabilities are.

The redesign ended up taking a little more time than I had originally planned because the more I coded, the more I learned and more additions popped up in my head that I wanted to implement. So I had to adjust a lot of what I was doing. I knew I wanted to implement jQuery for the first time with the homepage slider, I knew I wanted to build more around usability and search engine optimization, and I wanted a higher quality feel to the overall design.

My portfolio images prior to the redesign where laid out in an unorthodox way which I didn't like and my headings were horrible. My CSS was not shorthand and it was all over the place. There was a lot of stuff I was ultimately not happy with, although the background image did have a certain cool factor, I wanted to shy away from that.

What I've Learned

WordPress is a wonderful platform and I wasn't taking advantage of the dynamic capabilities it has, so I pushed myself to read a book called Digging Into WordPress (thanks to @mikesmith and @amberweinberg for the tip). This book taught me a lot and is definitely worth keeping in your arsenal of resources. I need to find the time to read the whole thing again because there is so much useful information that I could still use in future projects.

Some of the things I learned in WordPress are:

• A much better understanding of how WordPress uses PHP to make the final website that you see
• How to implement jQuery
• What a custom function is and how to call it
• Custom PHP templates to use in different pages of the website
• Search Engine Optimization
• Security

More stuff learned throughout this development process:

• How to use jQuery (a little bit)
• CSS3 techniques
• CSS Sprites
• A better, cleaner, more semantic way to code (which makes it easier to find chunks of code and helps with load times)

Conclusion

Since I graduated a few years back and am finished taking random classes at the community college where I live, I have been reading books in my free time to teach myself. I am my teacher. Namely Digging Into WordPress, but there is another that I thought was really inspiring as a newcomer to the freelance world called Freelance: Design In Practice.

I recommend both books to anybody either starting out/wanting to start freelancing or trying to push their skills in the wonderful world of WordPress. 

Have you recently found a new way to do something and implemented it into what you have done? Let us see!

Also, I encourage you to leave some feedback on my new redesign. It would be greatly appreciated.