Suzanne Sataline

Project Description

Suzanne Sataline was one of my students when I taught at MediaBistro. She’s a journalist based in Hong Kong, where riots were happening while I built her website.

Suzanne wanted a clean, simple website that used antique maps as headers. Her old site had been infected by malware and was lost, requiring a bit of creativity in terms of retrieving images and content. (It’s a good thing the Wayback Machine exists.)

Because of her past experience, backups were very important to her. I set all of my clients up with BackupBuddy, backed up either to their cloud hosting or to my Amazon S3 account. She was also disillusioned with her previous hosting company, so we moved her to GoDaddy WordPress Hosting.

One of the challenges in the site was finding appropriately licensed antique maps for the header images. Another was creating the grid layout for the article page, which uses blog posts. After trying a couple of plugins, I gave up and coded it myself.

This site uses Graphy, the same free theme I use for my personal blog. Except for that custom template, of course. (Why yes, I DID create a child theme.) I have to say that once it came time to customize things, I was sorry not to be working with Genesis, though it was not that difficult to build the Graphy child theme.