In my years as a student I have worked with a range of programs and user interfaces. This week however, proved to be more challenging than all those experiences combined as WordPress refused to cooperate and offer me the critical accessibility feature, a menu.
Going up and down the taskbar on my dashboard I could not locate the menu tab and went down a spiral of clicking throuhg every customization feature I could find to pinpoint how exactly to input a menu. After no such success and my tutorial being a few days away, I became creative with my solutions and edited my header with words that I then linked to general categories, serving as a makeshift menu without the dropdown functionality or the beauty of a menu heading to click on.
A few days past in further painstaking processes of attempting to find a menu when I discovered, with Mikaela’s help, that the other themes automatically created menus and were able to import a complete other tab that allowed me to customize my website’s menus. This turned out to be a rather quick fix considering my frustrations but I am quite happy with the way it turned out nonetheless. Though in my defence, the assistance that I did consult turned out to be useless.
On the less aggravated side of things, my customizations to my site’s colors and accessiblity were far simpler processes and completed with little hassle. In my original vision board imaginings and research regarding the key aspects of website aestethics, I found my priority to lie with site colors (Pluff 1). The green, white and pink that I have now decided on as my color pallete serve as a tribute to lotuses, one of my favorite flowers, and with the general character of my website, being calm but modern and bold simultaneously.
Aside from designing my website, my blog post included a poem I wrote about the ongoing Palestinian Israeli conflict and is a rather charged poem with imagery that urges readers to not only contemplate accepted narratives but to understand the trials of betrayal within brotherhood. My main inspiration behind this poem was my learnings from 10 Myths About Israel by Jewish histographer and social activist Ilan Pappe. His works explore the myths and twisted truths that have become a primary part of the conflict’s narrative and how critical understanding the true stories is to our actions today and tomorrow. If you would like to learn more about the conflict don’t hesitate to do your own extensive research, always keeping in mind bias! Feel free to start with the Global Conflict Tracker, which provides up a rundown of the conflict’s timeline.
Works Cited
Center for Preventative Action. “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict | Global Conflict Tracker.” Global Conflict Tracker, Council on Foreign Relations, 17 Jan. 2023, https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/israeli-palestinian-conflict.
“How to Add Menu in WordPress? 2 Easy Ways.” WpHow, WordPress, 8 Dec. 2022, https://wphow.co/kb/how-to-add-menu-in-wordpress/#To_Add_Menu_In_WordPress_Using_Menus_Screen.
Pluff. “7 Elements of an Aesthetically Pleasing Website – Best Managed Cloud …” Applied Innovations, https://www.appliedi.net/blog/7-elements-of-an-aesthetically-pleasing-website/.
“Ten Myths about Israel.” Goodreads, Goodreads, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31171856-ten-myths-about-israel.