Starting a new website

Building a new website is kind of interesting. I started making websites way, way back when the internet was first invented. I had to actually write the HTML code. Then some programs were invented which would do the coding, like FrontPage, and PageMill. I was very happy about that. I put up a site on AOL that lasted for 12 years. When AOL stopped website hosting, they sent out a bunch of warning emails, which, of course, I ignored until one day I went to log onto the site because someone was interested in one of my paintings and I wanted to show her a picture of it. Instead of the site, I found a single page from AOL with the face of a smiling vixen saying, ‘ah, sorry. We stopped hosting and your site is gone.’ Honestly, I hyperventilated and nearly passed out. That was 12 years of work down the drain. I had built a huge site with all kinds of blog-like info on it. My thinking at the time was that most artists were just putting up exhibitions of their work. Kind of an internet portfolio. I wanted something more. I started an Open Studio site with information about all of the things I was working on. Ah well. It was gone. I did have some backup. Not the whole site, but some. Maybe I could turn it into an eBook. The problem with that is that the photos are so small, they won’t publish. Way back in the way back time before WiFi, there was just dial-up and dial-up was veeeery slooooow. A computer crash, here and there, destroyed my original photos, and all I have are the crunched down mini-kilobyte ones I created to upload swiftly on dial-up.

Okay. SO. Here I am. I had a good deal for a website with one provider and that was set up five years ago. $100/yr. Not too bad and with my own domain name too. Ah. Guess what? The five years are up and now they want something like $300 per year. I cannot justify that. So, guess what? I am building a new website.

I thought I would try WordPress. Good price for a domain. Maybe it will last? I can hope. Anyway. This afternoon I hammered away on it, trying to figure out the new methods of website building. I was struggling with the interface and thought I would give the code a look to see if I could figure out how to add a menu to the top of the page. Darn. The code has gotten really complicated. I can still sort of read it but that didn’t help. I went back to the visual interface and started to click buttons, and + signs and gosh, golly darn it, after I asked the Archangels to give me a hand, things started to work. Sort of. I was able to add a URL link to a page I had created in the site. Well. I had to go through a few themes before I found one that actually had a menu on top and don’t you know, delight of delights, when I activated that one, it added my first pages as a menu at the top. Yeah! Then I created a new page and clicked around on the menu bar banner and found a + sign and clicked on that and a drop down menu appeared saying, “Add URL”. Wow. I can’t imagine what kind of tutorial or book would have been able to tell me how to do that! When in doubt, click here and there and see what happens. Also, it helps to send some prayers to the Archangels for assistance. I’m sure they intervened.

Themes. Canned themes are the basis of the new site building process. Activate a theme and then modify it to my needs. It struck me how specifically tailored the themes are. The one I chose is for an architectural newsletter group of some sort. I am amazed to see how it is structured to be a brochure. I have to sit back and contemplate this whole scenario again. What do I want to do with the new site?