For my final project, I chose to reformulate a website for The Agency at UGA, an on-campus, student run talent agency that has been operational since 2011. As previous head of public relations and graphic design, I have managed to re-design the website every year to make it bigger and better than the year before. This time, I wanted to tackle that goal using WordPress.

I really love The Agency, however I noticed that with this organization we were dedicating over $200.00 to our website alone. To remedy this, I believed I could produce a functioning website via WordPress that would continue to exude a professional face for our organization and function as a more effective messaging platform for our updates throughout the year.

WordPress provides a very simple menu option that allowed me to easily arrange and modify each page with ease. I focused on the Talent Page and Home Page first since those are usually our most visited platforms, and as such I wanted to provide each with unique aspects that were both informational and interactive. The hover panels were fun to work with, however I experienced major issues (and still and experiencing major issues) with getting the text to match up with the colored hover. However, my icon links are very useful and provide an easy visual for clients and sponsors alike to recognize and act upon.

I would like to be able to search a particular model’s name and be able to have the site direct me to them, however I am still trying to figure out how I would do that via Javascript. Additionally, I am still working on an alphabetical sorting tool as well as category sorting that can show different results for clients looking specifically for male models, for girls with curly hair, for individuals with certain measurements, or even by their previous experience. To do this, I am trying to incorporate a more extensive use of tags per model.

Satisfied with how the site was coming along, I went ahead and initiated the transfer process. This was a mistake. The domain transfer took far longer than anticipated, and I was unable to work on said domain while it was transfering, an element that I failed to account for. To remedy this situation, I instead continued to code most of the website under my own personal domain until I got the green-light.

Shopping for Themes and dealing with them is a whole process in and of itself; while WordPress is beautiful in its execution, many themes that I had leaned into actually ended up breaking the overall structure of my sites. I spent $30 on a premium version of a theme, only to find out that it cannot be uploaded (and they do not have a return policy). I eventually settled on a premiere theme that was dedicated to portfolio showings, however even now I still run into issues with being unable to download certain plugins, widgets, and even images or videos due to an “upload error.” I’ve been trying to troubleshoot most of these issues myself, delving into the Cyberduck files and ensuring that each link is still intact, but to no avail. Since these aspects drastically affect the event section of the site, needless to say I am frustrated with the current process. However, I was exceedingly happy with the single scroll home page I managed to create, as well as the final application of the hover effects and their links to the appropriate request forms.

Overall I’m really happy with how the site is coming along. I think the additional menu hovers and the modern design really drive home the feeling I wanted to convey about The Agency, and having the profile plugin is exceedingly useful in allowing for easy editing as our models come and go. Additionally, this allows for a greater showcase of their portfolios, and I like the flexibility that WordPress has provided me in that capacity. I love hover effects, and I’m excited that I can now know how to use them! And more importantly, I’m really happy knowing that this is a site that will be useful to people, and is in a very large way a legacy piece that I can pass down to the next leader of the organization for them to know and update without me.