Project Three Reflection

I grew up playing Animal Crossing on the GameCube and absolutely fell in love with the cozy game aesthetic. So it only makes sense that in March 2020, when the world shut down, I purchased New Horizons for the Nintendo Switch and got sucked into the universe all over again. I spent days leveling up my island, Coco Kay, shopping at Nook's Cranny for the latest items, playing the Stalk Market, and searching for the perfect custom designs for my island. I say all this to share how involved I was in this game, and the level of attention I wanted to put into this project.

Content

I though it would be the funniest (and cutest) idea to do a take on the island's Bulletin Board for the content site. I imaginged having the most recent posts on the home page, and having the board filled with real-life announcements from my copy of the game. But, I wanted it to be as close to the aesthetic as possible. So I went searching for a theme that fit, and found Astra, which I quickly fell in love with. It gave me everything I needed for free and helped me customize the site on a large scale, down to the brand and accent colors. I also found a plugin, Custom Fonts, that worked for uploading custom fonts, because what is Animal Crossing without the adorable fonts?

I ran into a few issues with the font, mainly how WordPress renders the fancy apostrophe. It kept putting massive kerning between it and the following letter (like this -> let' s instead of this -> let's). I had to do a LOT of digging and asking, and found that I could add a custom PHP snippet to ask WordPress not to run its smart punctuation conversion. I had to install another plugin, Code Snippets, for this snippet, and the code was easy to implement.

I also added just the tiniest bit of custom CSS throughout the site: one adjustment to the speech bubble from Isabelle, because I felt it needed a little dimension, and another to the post metadata. I wanted the author's name (do you spy Isabelle's name? ;-)) and things that weren't links to also be the brown text color. For a qualitative touch, I installed a plugin for a newsletter, MailPoet, which created a pop-up for island residents to add their email address to be emailed bulletins. I giggled creating this entire site, and LOVE how it turned out.

Commerce

Sticking with the Animal Crossing theme, I wanted to do a replica of what it might look like to shop at Nook's Cranny, run by Timmy and Tommy. Because I had fallen in love with the Astra theme and felt quite comfortable with it (really, I spent about 6 hours playing with it), I was honestly aggrivated I needed to find a different theme for this site. Lo and behold, I found Kadence. I think I found this theme to be a bit easier to use than Astra, but with both themes, I can see how paying for the subscription could prove incredibly useful for a professional site.

I had to do the same bit of PHP code for the font on this one, using the same Code Snippets plugin, but I could only do one font this time around due to the theme's limitations. The working fonts plugin for this theme is called Use Any Font. I also added the same CSS to the bubble at the top of the home page for Timmy and Tommy. Consistency!

For the products, I added real-life items you could purchase in the shop and added reviews from island residents. A few of the items also include videos sourced from YouTube on how the items are used in-game, just in case it would be helpful to see that information. I added variations to the tools portion, because in-game, you can also upgrade and purchase higher levels of tools that work a little better than the lower tiers. And as a final touch, I included some linked or recommended items that would show up for the antique series of furniture once it's added to the cart.

Final Thoughts

This was the most familiar project to me. I began my web dev journey in WordPress and learned A LOT just by doing hands-on things. I also worked with Divi and Beaver Builder (eep sorry), so seeing how the site should be edited natively was just the tiniest learning curve. I also haven't touched WordPress since about 2020, so it's been a while! However, I love the improvements to the editing tools, and found the block editing EXTREMELY helpful.

Thank you again for an incredibly fun project (and for allowing me to express some quirky creativity)!