Raabia’s Blog

16. March Response

March 16, 2009 at 8:33 pm (Uncategorized)

I have spent a lot of time attempting to modify my CMS, and this has been a lot more frustrating than I had imagined.  I realize how unfamiliar I still am with CSS and the coding language.  One of the key areas of concern I have is knowing where to go to in order to make modifications.  I seem to have to most trouble knowing how to look for what is in the source code in the content section of the FTP.  I am trying to figure out when it is best to modify the CSS style sheet through the FTP, as opposed to making changes on the WordPress dashboard or WordPress’ internal text editor.

My site is coldwarmemory.com. The public theme for my WordPress installation is called Ocular Professor, and I like it because of its sleek and streamlined look.  I have so far changed around the font families and colors of the posts and the headers, took out the extra “skip to content”  in the header and extra information in the footer.  As far as the homepage is concerned, I am still trying to find out what the difference between a post is and actually want to get rid of the blog aspect and just add in content.  I managed to add in a photograph in the about section just as a test try, but I want to see if it will be possible to add a gallery of pictures for each of the linked pages.  Speaking of which, for some reason when I add in child pages for the adult pages, the child pages do not show up on the site.  I am not sure how to go about correcting this so that these pages are visible, so any suggestions are welcome!  After looking up the FAQs and WordPress support blog, I activated the pages widget but still did not seem to have any luck.  I installed and activated a plug-in for a flash player to have flash with a series of photographs from my trip to Berlin on the homepage, but am still learning how to play around with it to make it work.  I have to come up with a video montage and then upload that via the flash player is my guess.  I also activated the links list but don’t see them on my site even though it says they are visible!  I have also been thinking about adding music to the homepage, which can either make or break the page, depending on the song and the user.  I would like have an on-off switch as well, so the user can choose as to whether or not he or she wants to listen to music.  I am still looking for the most appropriate/suitable music, seeing that this is a site about Berlin’s history.

On a more constructive note, I have come up with some more detailed outlines on paper, in the form of embryonic site maps and wire frames, so hopefully I will be able to translate my notes onto the computer at some point in the near future.  I have all of these ideas in my head but am not entirely sure how I will be able to actualize them for my web site.  My brother and mom gave me some tips on how to make the site more aesthetically pleasing, so it helps to have these different opinions.  After having gone to the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall Symposium at GW last week and re-visiting these issues again, I finally figured out how I would like to divide the content of my site.  While in Berlin for the 2 week graduate course, my professor and I divided the syllabus into week one: dealing with the Nazi past and week 2: dealing with the East German past.  For the purposes of this project, however, I might just keep my focus to the East German past and the Berlin Wall because this topic provides so much material as it is.

Anyway, I am continuing to work on these modifications tonight and throughout the week, and I hope to get a better hold on making changes more efficiently.