Reflection 2: Oct 15th, 2024
For this week, I made several small changes on my website. Firstly, I change the typography. Whenever I go to my website, I look at my tagline and it is not captivating enough. I looked at a few other websites from peers, and the one that stood out to me was always the one with very nice typography. My initial theme for the website was to be clean and minimalist, which will fit with the overall cozy and calmness of drinking matcha. This is why I settled with a basic typography in the beginning. However, this ultimately made my tagline look boring and does not give a strong impression at first glance. Therefore, I browse through the typography library and pick out a new typography that fits the overall image of my website. The new font is still basic, but it has some round edges that adds a slight uniqueness to it. In addition, I changed all the fonts to sans-serif. Before, I would use the sans-serif for main title and serif for paragraphs/description. I loved it at first, but the more you look at it, they seem unorganized and not cohesive. As a result, I changed everything to sans-serif and it looks so much better. The whole site structure looks more cohesive and well put together.
For contents, there were also several changes. With the weekly reflection, I was planning to post every week on the same page but I soon realized that it was very unorganized. It would be difficult to locate if you want to see a specific week. If you want to see the later weeks, one would have to scroll all the way down which is annoying and time-consuming. Therefore, I made a separate weekly reflection page that will include the link to each week post, which is easier to navigate. Similarly, I made the same changes for all the content topics. For this week, I did not publish any posts. Instead, I was focusing on changing the overall layout and reorganizing everything. This does not mean that I didn’t do any writing. I made a backup Google Docs file for all the contents that I will be posting. It will be beneficial if technical issues arise or someone tries to hack my website. In addition to that, I create a content plan. I listed out all the coffee shops I have visited and wrote some draft posts for that, which I will be posting for the Matcha Hunters series.
For user experience, everything works fine. I do a weekly testing for my site to check if everything works as normal like links or images. I would try to access the site by different devices as well as internet browsers. After changing the typography, I checked and the font appeared to be the previous one. I tried to change it again multiple times and it was weird. In the edit section, it would appear to be the font I wanted. Yet, if you access it, the previous will still show despite I have saved all the changes. Therefore, I decided to leave it as that and try to access it on another day. As a result, after I retry the next day, the new font was up. This made me realize that with many changes to the layout, WordPress would need some time to update everything. This is a reminder for the future that if I want some changes to be available when I want it to be, I should change it a few days before the designated dates.
With security, I checked and the overall condition was good. I did sign up for a free Limited Login Attempt that WordPress suggested, and finished setting up for that. The number of login attempts remains at the safe level. Therefore, with site security, there were not many changes but rather updates.