This initial draft site has been created to function as a base to tweak from. Many modifications and tweaks to structural flow, content, branding, color pallets, custom illustrations are needed though.
Feel free to follow along with me on this journey as I relay my experiences designing this site! I will be providing tips as well as describing problems encountered and solutions developed to solve those problems.
I will design this site as both a personal site and, a business site, while also providing tutorial's along the way!
Sincerely,
Ronald L. Blake
I used PopularFX’s PageLayer Builder for most of the work thus far on this site along with Formidable Forms for the Contact Form and Newsletter Form in the Footer and used MegaMenu for the Menu. I have also created a bit of custom CSS and other odd edit techniques to various pages, template elements and theme parts to be able to get to many elements and edit those elements that the PageLayer Builder has not allowed me to access in the Free version.
So far though I have to say that PageLayer is a good builder allowing access to edit more elements than previous builders I have used. I did just purchase the Lifetime License of the Ultimate Pro Tier version of Oxygen Builder which appears to provide much more streamlined and clean coding with minimum Javascript, PHP, etc, to keep the code bloat to a minimum and allow pages to load much faster as well as it appears to provide much more design control of most every element in a design to include it’s base empty theme of sorts, template creation and access to all elements parts, such master templates, headers, footers, body elements, end user editable contents sections, side bars, etc!
I just started playing with Oxygen and am beginning to view their Video documentation on the tools available for access to control front-end and back-end content and to use it in conjunction with advanced front-end and back-end programming tools and programming languages to gain full access to control the site element appearances while also being able to work in conjunction with WooCommerce edit its design elements to create a conforming appearance between store elements and non-store elements, pages, widgets templates & template parts as well as providing clean back-end editing tools where they are not provided access to in other builders.
This said though, when activating the Oxygen editing/building Plugin while PageLayer and PopularFX are also activated, my Headers and Footers disappear from all of my pages and thus does appear to not be compatible with each others content structures so I have some debugging to do possibly so I may end up resorting to a full rebuild in Oxygen from scratch after I feel comfortable with it after learning it well which will take a while given the complexity and vast abilities it provides and it will be a learning curve.
I will begin keeping copious notes and start creating some how-to’s and work-around Tutorial’s as I am refreshing a lot of my knowledge that has been mothballed for many years and get up to spec/par on the new tools and capabilities available now that are new to me.
Sincerely,
Ronald L. Blake
Update: 17Jul2024!
Due to limitations I have found in some design control aspects, I will be completely rebuilding this site from scratch in Oxygen Builder in an offline space and then upload the re-designed site here so please bear with me as it sits idle here in its current design and base structure!
I have built a couple of sites for others in Oxygen now and feel comfortable enough rebuilding this site in it but, will build it on a home server first then upload it so I can keep this active until the new base site is fleshed out and ready to upload and refine!
I also want apologize that this site went on the back-burner for about a year after life got in the way due to my health status and other priorities!
Sincerely,
Ronald L. Blake