Community Forums › Forums › Archived Forums › General Discussion › Hired a developer and now confused how it's suppose to look
- This topic has 7 replies, 3 voices, and was last updated 8 years, 9 months ago by wanderer.
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July 22, 2015 at 10:15 am #160104wandererParticipant
So I read the 4 Hour Work Week and some similar books, and decided to hire a developer for the first time to upgrade to the latest responsive version of Lifestyle, since I have a steep learning curve.
The first thing that was concerning is that the fellow edited the live site instead of the staging site I set up, but it is not my primary site so I didn't sweat it until the page broke b/c of duplicate css.
I noticed he downloaded the Simple Custom CSS plugin, is that how developers usually work? Just asking because I always edit the css using an offline program but the things I learned seem to be outdated.
Now, the site looks a little strange to me, but I'm not sure how it is suppose to look and don't have a mobile device to check it there.
it's:
Wander-Argentina.org
My questions are:
• Is it suppose to have so much white space and with such large thumbs and text on the front page?
• Should the date be showing somewhere on the front page like on the older themes?
• Where are the guidelines in the background image? Don't those come with the theme out of the box?
• Does the text come centered out of the box?
• The old comments from Facebook aren't showing, do those get erased on upgrade or is there a way to preserve them?
• My old previous version of Lifestyle site had the feature box followed by two columns of content than the third column taking up the bottom, does that take customization now?
I also got 19 errors on https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/ It says Rich snippets are not enabled. Does this have something to do with the theme or customizations?Sorry for all the questions. I appreciate all help.
July 22, 2015 at 1:02 pm #160134Victor FontModeratorAll developers have different ways of working. If the developer you hired likes to use that plugin, then it's his way of working. I don't use plugins for CSS. I modify the child theme's css file directly. I don't like to use plugins that override the theme or other plugins.
As for how is it supposed to look? How do you want it to look? That's up to you. Didn't you provide specifications for the developer to follow?
Old FB Comments? How did you get them on the site in the first place? Did you use a plugin or widget? Is the plugin still installed? Was the widget activated for the new theme? Website content just doesn't disappear because of a theme change.
Regards,
Victor
https://victorfont.com/
Call us toll free: 844-VIC-FONT (842-3668)
Have you requested your free website audit yet?July 22, 2015 at 2:40 pm #160143MoodyRivieraMemberIf I were more of a developer (rather than just being a designer and an editor) I probably wouldn't call myself a developer unless I worked directly in the code *without* a plugin to help with the CSS...but that would just be my own standard. There are all kinds of developers, and each one has his own way of working.
What I can say is that, based on looking at your site for a few minutes, it looks like he's got it set up to look pretty much as I would expect the Lifestyle Pro theme to look like.
Of course there are some things he could probably tweak to make things look a little bit "better"...for example, I would deviate from the way the theme is originally set up and I would want to have all the text in those front-page blurbs to be set flush left rather than centered...but I'd say he's doing a decent job...at least from my limited perspective.
*MoodyRiviera*
July 22, 2015 at 6:29 pm #160159wandererParticipantHi Victor
Thanks for your answer. I work the same way, that's why I asked, but I thought the best practices may have changed with Genesis.
To answer your question, I requested that the site look similar to the old site, but I noticed that out-of-the-box the new mobile responsive themes look quite different. The test site for my other site looks like this:
http://wander-argentina.com/test/
To my eye, the above looks more serious, organized and less mommy-bloggish (mom blogs are cool, I'm just going for a more informational site). From looking at other websites though, I suspect that my subjective website tastes may be outdated or that there are too many elements to load well on mobile devices. (As I mentioned, with no smart phone, I'm pretty removed from the user experience, although it's 40% of my traffic!)
I'm pretty sure I had hardcoded the FB comment section using the code they give you w/ FB developers. Hope I didn't lose that.
The crux of my problem is that I hired a guy to customize the site on a per project basis, but aside from fixing the header, I don't have a good idea of how much work he put in and I don't want to be too demanding, although it looks funky to me now.
I'm confused why for instance there is no 'today's date', or the background grid lines. Doesn't the theme come w/ date and gridlines out of the box?
Did he do customizations I didn't request, or -it crossed my mind after the page broke- that he may not have worked on a parent/child theme before and maybe some of the css got overridden?
Thanks!
July 22, 2015 at 6:41 pm #160164MoodyRivieraMemberDidn't you look at the Lifestyle Pro theme before you decided to go with it for your redesign?
The developer you hired has got your web site looking very close to what the Lifestyle Pro theme looks like right out of the box. Looks to me like he did a nice job.
You say you're confused about why there's no "today's date"...and wondered whether the theme comes with "date" right out of the box.
It would have only taken a minute or so for you to look at the Lifestyle Pro demo to see what it looks like, and then you would see that it does *not* come with the "date" right out of the box. Same with the "gridlines"...it's easy to look at the demo and what kind of gridlines there are.
http://my.studiopress.com/themes/lifestyle/#demo-full
I don't see what your problem is...maybe not enough planning on your part, and it also sounds like you don't really communicate with your developer. Maybe you've put too much faith in what you read in "The 4 Hour Work Week."
*MoodyRiviera*
July 22, 2015 at 7:00 pm #160165wandererParticipantHi Moody
Thanks for your first message. I got a notice from google that I needed to go mobile on my websites, but had too much stuff to do to investigate much or do it myself, as I would like.
Now that I look at the demo, I see it doesn't come out of the box with those elements. I just thought intuitively it would be similar to the previous two Lifestyle themes I worked with, which did.
I suppose part of my problem is that I don't have a mobile device, and am in a developing country -- no one I know has an iPhone -- so I can't check the work. There is a bit of a disconnect for me on how new themes are designed to function on a small device and how it looks on a laptop as a consequence.
July 22, 2015 at 7:10 pm #160166MoodyRivieraMemberThanks for your note, and I understand what you mean.
In regard to viewing your site with a mobile device...did you know that there are ways to simulate the experience? You might want to try some of these mobile emulators:
There are sites similar to this one:
http://mobiletest.me/Also, if you use the Chrome browser, you might want to try some of the developers tools as shown here:
http://www.goinflow.com/using-chrome-as-a-mobile-emulator/I don't 100 percent trust any emulation, but using something like this might give you a good idea of what your site looks like on various mobile devices.
*MoodyRiviera
July 24, 2015 at 12:05 pm #160324wandererParticipantThanks Moody -- that helps a lot!
The first one I checked didn't seem to turn out too well!
http://mobiletest.me/iphone_5_emulator/?u=http://wander-argentina.org
or the second one: http://mobiletest.me/htc_one_emulator/?u=http://wander-argentina.org
You did pick up on something, in learning how to delegate tasks -- it seems that if something goes wrong, it requires the work one is trying to avoid in the first place to figure out what's going on!
Thanks, seems there is still work to do.
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