240 Certification
Project Overview
The 240 Certification website is a small web project that the company 240 Tutoring set up to give prospective clients more information about how to become a certified teacher in Texas via their services. A former coworker of mine reached out to me about an open contract role that 240 Tutoring had asking for a developer to create this site. I accepted the role and went on to create a custom WordPress theme and custom content blocks for this site and its content, based on the mockup their designer made.
Process
First, I met with my former co-worker and the designer from 240 Tutoring to go over the mockup, what was expected, timeline, payment, and other contract paperwork. Then, I went over the technologies I would use. For the custom theme, I used PHP with HTML to create the classic Template Files that can be referenced on the WordPress Developer website. Each template file is dynamic. WordPress has template tags which are functions that allow users to call and output data from the database. So I built standard templates for pages and page components like the header and footer, that can be used throughout the website. All the user does in the content management system portion of WordPress is just select the appropriate options to select the appropriate template for their page or blog posts. I also used CSS to style the theme according to the mockup provided.
A large part of the project was the custom blocks. WordPress’s custom blocks allow users to add content to their site via an editor that will closely resemble how the content will look in the front-end of the website. It helps users get a better idea of how their content is arranged, which helps keep expectations as close to the reality as possible. For these custom blocks I referenced WordPress’s API reference guides and this WordPress Gutenberg block training by Imran Sayed any time I got stuck or if I wanted to find a new feature to add to the blocks I was building. I used React, SCSS, and PHP to help create both the back-end and front-end appearance and functionality of these custom blocks.
Outcome
After this project was completed, it went live and I learned that it earned a Web Core Vitals average score of 97. I learned a lot from the project about how useful the WordPress documentation is and how strong and passionate the community is about sharing knowledge so that developers can understand how to make great websites for clients. In turn, this helps empower clients to handle and direct their website’s journey once the developer hands it off.