Geez. What a week. I was supposed to be on vacation, but instead I assigned myself an unreasonable amount of work to do. I decided, as I often do, that I am not yet completely satisfied with my web prescence. But what is a girl like me, with no coding experience to do? Well….a lot. I started with the research. I thought at first that the problem might be with my host, so i spent days reserching and trying other hosts without canceling my old package. Once I found one that I thought might workout because they provided a lot a lot of web-buiding features, I set out to try and learn some of these programs. X__x Oh god. Bad idea. Maybe.
I learned a lot about programs like Joomla, Drupal, Mambo, and whatever, but it took another two DAYS to even get to the point where I could discover that I couldn’t really do what I wanted to with them without weeks of work. Blah. I don’t have that sort of time. School’s going to start again soon so I need to figure something out fast!!
–A word of advice for anyone else out there who’s host-shopping, if you’re thinking of going with Fatcow, check out ipage instead. I found that their user interface is exactly the same, only ipage is cheaper and offers $400 more in free features.
Okay so my next course of action was, since I have dreamweaver, to just learn HTML and CSS and totally code my own website! And that worked for a little while. I bought a Dreamweaver for Dummies book, and I made my designs, and I got as far as being able to make really great backgrounds…..and then I realized. Wow, I have a lot of demands for my website. Things that would take a life-time for me to learn and code. I need a roll-over navigation bar with a drop-down menu. I want RSS feeds linking to this blog on the homepage, I want image galleries with thumbnails that can be enlarged to full size in the same screen. I want interactivity, a visitor counter, a date and time stamp and fun widgets…..it took me 3 days to get backgrounds down pat……
I do not feel that the Dreamweaver learning was a waste of time though, because that is something that I might still be able to use in the future. Because the whole website is stored on my hard-drive, if I ever want to go back to it, I can. I can take my time with this one. But for right now, I’m looking for something a little faster, and where the fancy stuff is already coded for me. I’m thinking of sorting my work in a flickr account, and then using their slideshow options to insert galleries into the site.
I want my work to be easier to navigate, and too seem more orderly.
Anyone have any feedback as to which direction I should take things??? shaunart.net
