Faith Baptist College was an old client that my current employer worked with. We built their current, live website. Our agency wrote the content, structured the pages, fully designed the site, and fully develop their site on WordPress. I was the sole developer on this project and was in charge of every aspect of this build, from development to launch.
Unlike Lancaster Bible College, this site was a brand new, empty, clean slate. I was able to work from an empty install and theme and work my way up. This didn't come without its own set of challenges. Right from the get go, this site was a MASSIVE undertaking. They had majors that shared data points, staff members that appeared in mutliple places, changing titles based on certain pages, user portals, etc. This site also was huge in terms of the number of pages and how much content was on each page.
There were so many different designed blocks/modules. I had to figure out how I was going to approach each one to avoid redundant code and a long stylesheet. This site needed a lot of data points that had to be shared throughout different pages and post types. Before starting this project, I definitely had to stop and think about how to do this efficiently. There is nothing worse than having to recode something you've just coded!
Right away, I knew this site needed to be coded in a different way than other sites. The way it was designed, this site shared a lot of "design elements" across various blocks and modules. The way I wrote CSS had to be different for this site. Instead of exclusively using the BEM method, I decided to go about it in a more utility class based kind of CSS. This way, I can quickly call classes for various blocks that share those some properties. For example, instead of exclusively writing a "flex property" for a content section, I would write that CSS style in its own class and call that class for that section, instead. This definitely took more upfront work and time, but in the end, I was able to quickly go through and add CSS classes based on what I needed instead of having to rewrite them every single time.
This site was a huge learning opportunity for me. It taught me that not all methods are best for all projects. Every project deserves its own well laid out plan. This project forced me to think of new ways to code and to do it efficiently. Had I coded this site the way I coded others, it would have taken me much longer and would have been a nightmare to write! Massive sites like these are always scary at first, but ultimately, they are great opportunities to learn and to grow in my skillset.