Implementing UX Design

So, as I may have mentioned, I got some very nice UX people to work on my project with me. After doing an impressive amount of user research, they came up with some preliminary mock-ups for some of the pages of my site. All I have to do is, you know, make my site look like their pictures. Which I somehow feel should be easier than it is turning out to be.

Here is the mock-up of what my homepage should look like:


And here is what my current homepage actually looks like:


You can see the differences, right? Yeah, so did the designers. I suggested they could go ahead and put my site on their portfolios, now that it's live and all - get me some inbound links! And they were like, Um, sure, just as soon as the site, you know, looks like our design.

This is the 6th carousel component I've tried out - called Alice Carousel (react-alice-carousel). There's a screenshot on the component's repo that looks exactly like the one in the mock-up: overlay Next and Previous buttons on the sides of the carousel, and dot controls overlaid along the bottom. But that's nothing like what it looks like when I run it. Also, there are about 50 semi-documented options.

Some aspects of the UX mock-up are just not realistic or practical, based on the tools available to me. For example, the mock-up has a login button (upper right corner), which has no discernible purpose. Also, there is a search bar in which users would search for text. The API that I'm using for image retrieval (Cloudinary) allows for storage of metadata in the form of key-value pairs, but it isn't searchable; I can only retrieve it along with the image. So I can display information about the pictures (ie medium, location, and whether or not it's for sale), but the only searching I can do is by tag. Which just means I have to make some kind of tool for searching tags, instead of text. I'm thinking maybe a dropdown box with all the tags on it.

Anyway, there's going to be a lot of experimenting with CSS between now and whenever my designers are ready to link to my site.

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