Building the website

It begins!

Getting WordPress running on Azure App Services was very straightforward. The preview Linux hosted option was way cheaper but not yet available in Aus region, so it's currently hosted in the US. I was able to fit the develop tier resourcing within my monthly allowance as a Microsoft Partner which was great.

Re-learning how to use WordPress after all these years was a bit of work. I got a fair way into customising the look and had to start over, I played with customisation in the beta editor and swapped between numerous themes which led to some very broken visuals. I wasn't able to get the well used WP Reset plugin working, so I just deleted the Azure App Services instance and started again.

Deployment version 2, I found the Lightning theme which I quite like - it provides a nice base layout and style and I like the customisation options and the auto scrolling slideshow on the front page.

I created the menu shells and uploaded some sample content to kick things off, including embedding our lighterpark gear lists. This mostly worked but had some extra random lines spread through the content which looked terrible! After a fair bit of troubleshooting I was able to fix this. The Lightning theme was setting a default style for all H2 headers which was creating an erroneous top border line on certain parts of the content.

I hacked together a custom css override and wrapped it around the embedded code to fix that!