GamerGeeks

GamerGeeks is a group of Dutch gaming enthousiasts who like to share their honest opinions about videogames with the world via YouTube. They asked me to make a website where they could have their own spot, categorize videos, post updates and stream some games they're playing. I decided to make the whole thing in Wordpress, the well known blogging platform that is slowly turning into a content management system. This decision was based on my previous experiences and the expertise I built up with Wordpress whilst developing spotonagency.nl. Particularly the ease of use for the editors and the amount of documentation available are what did it for me.

At first it didn't seem like there were that many hurdles. Only when developing it became apparent that something as 'Add a customizable banner' would become 'Add a customizable banner consisting of three parts, sometimes two, that is fully compatible with whatever image they upload'.

It was pretty tough to develop this one as I came across a lot of things that I hadn't dealt with before. User registration for instance, something I'd never tried before on a WordPress installation. Shielding off certain areas, smooth registration, confirmation e-mails all came into play. It took some time to fully implement, and I wish it'd been easier. But it turned out nice.

Styling was a bit tricky on the mobile part. I didn't specify any mobile site for the GamerGeeks, but I did develop it for a little surprise at the end. This resulted in only designing a desktop version at first, which was difficult to translate to mobile (it's usually better to go mobile first). Really had to get down and dirty to finetune a lot of elements, which unfortunately resulted in not so clean code.

Developing this really helped me out about knowing where the boundaries of WordPress were. Luckily WordPress's good sides outshine the bad, and I'd happily develop another WordPress theme.