Custom by Kyla

Screenshot of the Custom By Kyla homepage - featuring a brightly colored step stool for a child.

This was a fun demo site that I did back in 2019. I took a coding bootcamp that included making an individual project. While a lot of people made portfolio sites, I wanted to do something a little different. I had recently made a convertible step stool for my young son so I decided to do a fake sales site for step stools.

It turned out to be a really fun page. I do a lot of work with WordPress these days and I feel that specializing in one technology is really powerful. I don’t want to be making websites with a lot of different technologies because that means I won’t be really good at any of them. On the flip side of that I feel there is also something to be said for a broad base of knowledge. I’m including a post about this site because it isn’t a WordPress site.

It was coded from scratch, although it does use Bootstrap elements in it. I wrote each line of HTML and CSS for it and while this isn’t the most efficient way to make websites it’s a great experience to go through a few times.

The original version of the site was deployed using a Docker container, although I’ve since moved it to a new host that uses their own containerization setup and ditched the Docker element. I also abandoned the code that made the contact form work because all it brought was spam.

I always loved the simple, clean, fun design of the site. A lot of Bootstrap sites can look the same. I changed some of the elements to use bold colors which matched the kid-furniture theme.

I also worked really hard on the top element to get the two different images to both show full screen right off the bat. I wanted to really show-case the convertible element of the product. Of course it was important for this to look great on all screen sizes.

You can view the full site here.