In my Literary Journalism class, I’ve been largely in charge of managing the technical end of our website (see us here at In Bantam) (I just realized, you may not be able to view the site until May 1st, when we launch our Spring 2012 edition). I’ve enjoyed pretty much every part of this project, even though I felt a little typecast into my part. The professor knows I work at DTLT and that I have an affinity for computers, so it was an unspoken expectation that I would work the tech side. Either way, I’ve continued to learn.

An important goal for my group is to look professional. In Bantam may be a student-run literary journal, but that doesn’t mean we are taking our task lightly. One of the ways to accomplish this is by having a nice website–easily navigable with a sleek and relevant design. Our professors have impressed on us that it is unnecessary to “reinvent the wheel” (i.e., you don’t need to build a site from scratch when there is WordPress and a plethora of great themes), so we chose a WordPress theme and have been tweaking with the CSS to get the look we want.

"Color Pencils" by scui3asteveo on Flickr

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve struggled finding the right theme and the right look for this site. I think I’ve finally settled on the one you see now–Paragrams. I’m not as set on the colors–I think the purple is too bright–but I’m feeling a lot better about what I’ve got, now. Editing the colors was completely behind the scenes. I personally altered the CSS with a WP plugin called WordPress.com Custom CSS and a Firefox plugin called Firebug. Together, they are a serious force for web designers across the Internet.

As these things always go, I found myself nit-picking over unique classes and ids before realizing that I could simplify the whole deal by targeting just one tag, a tag that enveloped all the others. Computers are always like that…

Many thanks to Martha Burtis for her help.