heylouise

Ah... well aggregator sites are the way for me!
I get an (almost daily) email digest from webdesignernews.com and occasional emails from developer.com
It's easy to read them on my phone on public transport.

The design looks really nice!
Is the website only about Asian destinations?

Get the content written. Then organise the content. Then sort out the headers and footers, trust marks, calls to action and other elements needed on the site.
This will then tell you what html structure you need.
Once you have the framework in place and everything works and flow you can then begin coding the CSS.

Flywheel Local won't let you pull down an existing site or push back up to a live server because it's specifically for WP Engine sites. You can still develop locally using it, and use a different means of deploying the files on your server. If you don't want to use Local, then https://www.mamp.info/en/ isn't a bad option. I use the Pro version for any PHP work because I need a lot of the features there, but you would be fine just on the free version.
I'm not sure what your deployment options are back to the WordPress hosted solution, but ideally you would want to manage this with a version control system like Git.

Just so you know, I've decided to go with Shopify for this project.

All good ideas. Thanks all.
 
The women's networking circle is providing me with some good contacts, but not quite enough to sustain me if I want to do this full time.

I'll add that competition here is far from high, especially compared to other disciplines, there's no chance in hell I'd have landed a career in any other form of engineering as fast as I have with the web. Just keep studying and working hard, nothing worth doing is ever easy. Stop procrastinating and focus on improving. The world of business is tough and takes no prisoners, you have to do what it takes to succeed and companies don't owe you a job, you have to prove you will add value in the role.

It's possible that it will run, but you're going to have this issue with every update, and some updates could introduce breaking code if they start using new language features.
 
If you're on shared or managed hosting, I would ask when they plan on upgrading these services. A host should be running the most up-to-date version, not just for compatibility, but also for security. PHP 5.3 came out in 2009 and stopped being supported as of August 2014, so it's seriously behind in terms of patches and fixes.

You need to publish quality content. End of story, there's no quick fix, hack etc.

Or you can just put it in as a regular link and text, I've been doing this for years and I don't get any spam, and even if I did It would be worth having to sift through the odd spam mail here and there in order to make it as simple as possible for legitimate people to contact me. I have the same opinion as far as captchas go, they are absolutely horrible for UX and accessibility.
 
With regards to the OP, I feel I'm repeating myself here again - but if you don't have the skillset then either acquire it or look for a different job. All of us on here who are employed have acquired the skills necessary for the roles we had. I had no experience in TDD, Agile, React that I needed for my current role so I spent around 6 months learning them in my free time. my current project has a bunch of technologies / frameworks that I was not familiar with - so I learnt them.
The recurring theme is you always have to be learning. If you don't like the idea of that then this isn't the career for you.
 
I can see you have limited design skills based on your website. As do I. So you can either pay a designer to mock up designs that you can then code up, or grossly simplify your design. Why are you attempting to use Ajax on your site (Which doesn't work btw) when you can just use regular links? Ajax is great but don't try shoehorning things on that are unnecessary just to prove you can do it. My blog is mostly about JavaScript - yet there is barely any actual JavaScript being used as it's not necessary. If you want to demo a skill create examples on CodePen or github and link to them.

You don't need a plugin. This is all you need:
function wp_maintenance_mode(){ if(!current_user_can('edit_themes') || !is_user_logged_in()){ wp_die('<h1 style="color:red">Private Website</h1><br />This site is for members only'); } } add_action('get_header', 'wp_maintenance_mode');

Ha ha. Careful fisicx. Comments like these on this forum tend to result in ENDLESS discussions about the quality of the education system

Pros: Great online community, plenty of resources and support, relatively easy learning curve and well documented and regularly updated codex.
 
However...
 
Front and back end are completely mixed up. As @@Jack commented in another thread, lack of native templating language and non MVC architecture make it difficult to achieve separation of business and application logic.
Forcing markup decisions on developers - you have to write a ton of code and reference the built-in classes to achieve basic markup changes.
URL re-writing is a nightmare.
Forcing default scripts and structure on developers - bloated front-end.
Slow database queries.
Lack of basic functionality, which very CMS should support as default imo (might be wrong on this one) such as breadcrumbs, proper pagination, etc.
 
It's not impossible to have a great, fast, well working site bulit on WP, but, well, why spend time, when you can install WP, buy a theme, install 10 or so plugins and you have (as @@citypaul said) something that resembles a site in a few hours.

And this rant is not targeted at small business owners who don't have the budget or at people who need a quick MVP (although a lot can be said re. desired MVP quality). It's for agencies who charge many 1000s of pounds for the above mentioned type of pre-made built, essentially conning people and giving the industry a bad name.

At my work we mainly develop the pages for small businesses using WP so I know the problems but I dont think it is fair to blame Wordpress for the plugins as no plugins are required for a Wordpress install.
 
What really irritates me is that Wordpress stores relative configuration settings in the database.
Example: In a WP multisite installation, multiple references to the server name and locations of folders are stored in the database which makes it a total pain to migrate the installation to another server.
 
Also I hear a lot of back-end coders complain that the architecture of WP is hard to understand as WP started out being non MVC and non OOP.
Though efforts has been made to change this, the deveopers of WP cannot really change the procedural code style of the core without affecting backwards compatibility.

Technically a developer shouldn't need to know how to design. But as mentioned, some agencies like people who can do a little bit of design and dev (I'm yet to find one...).
 
Yet I'm told, for instance, if the graphic designer has only done a home page for desktop - there may be a need for a FED to 'imagine' what the internal pages or mobile layout should look like - in addition to slicing the PSD.

I'll keep things brief.
 
There are no shortcuts You will never learn everything there is to know Developers get paid a lot of money because it is difficult to code and takes considerable effort and time to become competent. To become good requires thousands of hours. The true experts make an absolute fortune, even those whose expertise is in CSS which is considered one of the easiest 'languages' to learn, because even it has it's nuances and quirks and to deeply understand architecture for large codebases is an extremely difficult skill to acquire. In short you either learn enough to do what you want to do for this particular instance, or hire somebody to do it for you (Of course paying them fairly)
 
Based on your post I'd advise the latter. Otherwise take a look at sitebuilders like squarespace, but you will be limited by their software so it's unlikely you will get 100% of what you want. If you budget for a good developer almost anything is possible.

Very few people click the links in the footer. But I think it's nice to have presentation-wise. Put them in the same order as they would appear in the header.

I would say avoid using plugins for things you can do with custom theme functions - e.g. custom post types and custom meta fields. At least then you know that theme/function was crafted just for you - and you/your developer know how to work with it.

Make sure you keep WordPress and all plug-ins up to date.
 
Don't use 'admin' as your username, and don't use an easy to guess password.
 
Consider extra layers of protection, such as password protecting your admin directory.

It would be good to have an arrow or some other symbol on the accordion, to indicate it can be clicked on. Otherwise it looks like headings with no content.

Get a full brief (reject if they don't provide one)
Confirm the client understands what they have asked for (they often don't)
Confirm timescales (not just ASAP)
Set milestones (initial payments then stage payments)
Work out the costs
Tell them how much
Tell them anything else will incur extra costs.
Get written agreement.
Don't do anything until the initial payment has been paid.

Very few people click the links in the footer. But I think it's nice to have presentation-wise. Put them in the same order as they would appear in the header.

Header is too tall. It looks terrible on small screens. If you made it like tthat because of your logo than you should change logo. Besides that it's nice and clear. And I like your works
 
Cheers,
Adam

Well, I have a few different idea in mind thanks to your feedback fisicx!
 
 
Thanks, I don't see SVG logos that often, but when I read up on it, it seemed like a good idea.
 
Contact form is a planned feature.