Prior to designing my website for my current and future projects, I had no coding experience. The sheer intimidation of building a website had started to become overwhelming. However, that changed when I approached my design from a reading perspective rather than just a writing one. For example, by actually reading all of the code from the bootstrap template before trying to adjust it in anyway, I was able to understand what I can build. Instead of being intimidated by hundreds of lines of a language I could not understand, I broke it into segments as you would a book. After realizing what was important for my purposes and what was not, it made building the site more obtainable. The biggest hurdle I had to overcome while creating the site, was combining my template with another template to create my projects page. When doing this, the .css files overlapped. Instead of editing the 11,000 plus lines of code in my original .css file, I created a second .css file for the new projects page, which worked seamlessly.
I started with a bare template on bootstrap which was suggested by a video tutorial on LinkedIn Education. Unfortunately, the bare template was just that, a blank slate. Since my abilities are minimal I switched to the personal template which provided a pre-structured set of navigable (.html pages). I think since I started with the bare template, however, that gave me an advantage at reading the more complex personal website templates. Such as, ignoring the massive amount of code for the simple dot pattern on the home page, and knowing that was irrelevant to the information on the page.
When actually approaching my changes and personalization, I found it very easy to learn how to alter my site, by first editing the style and structure and then utilizing the code already present in the template to keep consistency. For example, early on I could not understand what the purpose of "the 'a' tag" was around my text. However, after seeing the tag multiple times in the same area of the code and altering it enough times in many places, I am starting to get comfortable with it being a way to break up my text and style text differently, in the same div.
By far my biggest struggle was implementing the projects page from a different template. This was mainly because the .html file I was trying to insert to my current website had its own styles.css file. This meant that when my original code was now reaching towards its styles, it was actually reaching into both files with the same names. As can be imagine this completely ruined the 3 hours I spent prior stylizing and structuring. The way I fixed this was actually very simple. All I had to do was rename the new styles.css to styles1.css, and then on my projects.html, change the src to the new styles1.css. I found this to be pretty intuitive as it felt no different than rearranging/renaming files when altering a program, such as a videogame.