One of my tasks for Mishka Social Services is to redesign the website. The website we had for a couple years was made and hosted through Wix and the Mishka board requested that I transfer the domain to Bluehost and create a new well-designed site using WordPress.
For starters I had very little familiarity with domain hosting so I had to do a lot of research just to figure out the transfer of the domain from Wix to Bluehost. I knew that this process took a few days and I wanted to make sure I was well prepared and knew exactly what I needed to do so that I wouldn’t delay the process and extend it beyond the usual amount of time. Once I figured out what was required it was simple enough to get done and really the longest part was waiting for the request to be processed.
After a couple days the site was transferred and things were seemingly smooth sailing until our domain emails through gmail stopped receiving emails. Before the transfer I had confirmed with the president of the board that the email accounts were created external of Wix and were done with Gmail. So I figured that the emails would be just fine. But we came to realize that there was some information we had to change on the DNS in Bluehost to link the Gmail domain emails to it. This resolved the problem and it is safe to say now that the emails are functioning as usual.
While I was waiting for the transfer process to occur I was doing some research on potential WordPress themes, I came across a few options but it wasn’t until a saw a little alert on WordPress about a theme called Zakra that I started to see some potential. The alert suggested (rightly so) that Zakra was one of the most customizable free themes available for WordPress. Zakra is a theme created by ThemeGrill and what’s great about that is that they have demo sites that you can import into your WordPress, and use as a starter site template for your website. So I decided to do just that and imported the theme Zakra Charity.
Starter or demo sites are great because they give you a template to work with, which is especially helpful when you are new to WordPress and are just starting to learn. To make things even better in turned out that Zakra was compatible with a plugin called Elementor that allows you to design your site in drag and drop kind of interface. My experience using Elementor so far has been phenomenal – it is definitely something that I would recommend.
The new Website can be found here, feel free to take a look at how it came out.
