Front-end Battle
Since I started learning how to program, I never gave much thought to becoming a front-end developer, and I've never been overly creative or
had a knack for design. Even with all of that in mind, I still decided against making this website using a template like Squarespace or
WordPress. I opted to code it myself, figuring that I shouldn't write off front-end development if I had never at least tried it.
Starting from scratch this summer, I taught myself HTML, CSS, and a little bit of PHP to finally bring my website to life. While the result
can be conveyed in a single sentence, the process cannot. I began with writing out, on paper, what content I wanted to have on my website and
how I wanted to lay it out. It is an understatement to say that what I initially imagined is nothing like how it came out. I went through
dozens of designs and ideas until I had it just right. That is, until I viewed it on my phone. My site was exactly how I wanted it on my
specific screen size but, with any other, all of the elements were misplaced and overlapped. This is when I sadly discovered website
responsiveness.
My next attempt was laying out a site for my desktop, and then using media queries to have a whole different site for my phone. While this was
sort of a fix, It was a lot of work to upkeep, was not maintainable, and didn't look perfect on medium screen sizes. I recalled hearing a
popular framework called bootstrap that was responsive by design with little work to be done to maintain that. So, after about a month of just
finding the right tool, I got to work and ended with a website that I'm proud of, a new found respect for front-end development, and lots of
skills and knowledge I can use for future front-end battles.