Making Contact

Recently I’ve been working on a design for Jenna Dioguardi's actor portfolio website. I’m building it as a custom template on the Wordpress platform so it’s easy for her to maintain without a development team.

Style guide for Jenna's site

Most of the work so far has been revising designs, and finally this week I’ve set out to code everything. It’s one of my first projects, so it will be a lesson in itself — learning as I go. My process has been “ok we’ve designed this really cool thing… now how do I make this?” Not the most time efficient process but one that definitely forces me to learn a lot!

My recent accomplishment has been designing a very simple contact form that integrates with the Wordpress admin panel.

I thought this was worth sharing, based on how it’s actually quite simple to code, and it’s a shame that developers so frequently rely on throwing a plugin into their website.

This article http://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/how-to-build-your-own-wordpress-contact-form-and-why/ by Harley Alexander was extremely helpful, not only in convincing me that I could feasibly accomplish this task on my own, but Harley is very thorough in his tutorials.

Honestly, before now, I’ve never really liked the PHP language. It always feels so messy: Mingling HTML, logic, and server requests all together into one messy script. There also seems to be an endless amount of functions that do such specific tasks, I find it tricky to work through when compared to other languages, but maybe that’s because I’m still a newbie.

Despite my grudge against PHP, Harley really kept his tutorial bare bones, yet included all the essentials necessary for a working contact form. If you’re looking for a nice breakdown on this topic, I highly recommend checking out his post.

Venturing onward, my task for today is to develop a portfolio page!