Just a short and sweet update – over the weekend I took project I’ve been working on for a while, Harpswell Aging at Home, live!
This website was definitely a fun project to work on. They came to me with a website builder site that didn’t really meet their needs, so it was fun to bring them over to WordPress and help them get it set up so that they have a website that works for them.
This project was fun because it’s one of the first times I’ve built out custom Gutenberg blocks for both the front and back end. Before I was lazy – often I’d use ACF to build a block, but I’d only concern myself with the front-end output. So the back-end was, at best, unstyled and ugly, and at worst full of gray boxes that say “Outputs X on front-end.” It wasn’t ideal. So for HAH I challenged myself to actually build the blocks out in a way that was not only usable in the front-end, but in the back-end as well so the client knows exactly what they’re editing. The result? It looks the same on both sides of the page and makes it super easy to edit:
Obviously, the site is built on the Genesis framework. To build out the custom blocks I used their Genesis Custom Blocks plugin. It’s not as feature-rich as I would have hoped – I think ACF-based blocks are better for complex blocks – but it was definitely easy to develop, and I think for this project it worked beautifully.
There were other challenges to this site, like creating a complex Gravity Forms-powered Donation Form, that kept me on my toes, but overall this project was a dream to work on. And I’m so excited it’s live now, so HAH can use it to help better serve their community.
Leave a Reply