As a novice, building your first webpage can be a nightmare of frustrations. I have just spent three months building the "beautiful" website for you to peruse!
First off it must have taken me three weeks to decide which webpage building app I was going to use. I started off with WordPress.org - I had been assured that it was THE BEST app in the world. I spent several days watching video after video on Youtube - desperately trying to get a handle on what the experts were trying to teach me! But they go so fast!! Their cursor is flying all over the screen, clicking on this "thing" or that "thing" all the while saying something like "you can click on this element and drag it over here - then you can stretch it this way and that to...." What element? Drag it where? Stretch it? Why? Oh my!
After a few weeks I had figured out how to get a Domain name, registered it and paid a fee for that tentative start. Plus I now had a Host page - again after reading several testimonies on which app, one of many, was the one to use. Paid out another fee and received access to a sort of off-line trial app of WordPress.org (not WordPress.com), which is designed to give you a chance to learn how to build your own page, make mistakes, and generally play around until you feel you have a handle on the process. I was not getting that feeling!
Here, I hasten to add, I am not a dummy when it comes to computers, software and the new "apps". Tools that have been around since the middle eighties to assist us humans on speeding up our work day; more than that, we could develop and perform skills we didn't even know existed before IBM presented us with the desktop (micro) personal computer. Make no mistake, this was big! We had barely become aware of Main Frame Computers and IBM was not yet a household name!
Actually, I was in on the ground floor with computing. I signed up with a Business College in Calgary to learn computer skills. I had been working as a typist and clerk-cum-bookkeeper ever since I left school.
In the college, all students had their own desktop computer to work on - but here was the thing: they didn't have hard drives! No way! Technology hadn't progressed that far yet; we had to work with two "floppy drives" built into the machine. So called because the storage disks we worked with were known as floppy disks! We learned four programs: D.O.S. (Disk Operating System), a word processing software, called WordStar, a spreadsheet application (later known as Excel) and a database application known as dBase. All these programs had to be controlled with the keyboard as the mouse had not been invented. A person had to learn all these commands, ctrl+S was save, ctrl+p was print, ctrl+c was copy, ctrl+b was bold. And so on.
I loved it all. Learning about ROM (read-only memory) RAM (random access memory) bits, bytes, binary code, batch files and so on, ad infinitum! When it came time for the final test, I came second in the whole class - first place was a young man I was in competition with the whole of the course - we were great friends and had fun seeing who could get the highest marks for a test. After the course I sallied forth into a new world of using computer applications for every task. Writing letters became a breeze - made a typo? No problem, back space or hit delete and retype. Missed out a word? Just hit insert and type away. I could write a whole book on those early days of using computers to carry out the menial, time-consuming tasks I had spent years yawning over, bored out of my skull! Eventually I was lucky enough to get a job with a bunch of computer techies who had formed a company and written custom software for the offices of small towns and villages.
In their office, nothing was done without the question "Can we do it on the computer?" first being asked. They automated everything that could possible be automated. I was their "Girl Friday". I did everything that was required to run the admin of their business - "automatically" of course. It was exciting! I learnt so much with those guys and I watched computers materialize from heavy, large desktop PC's with no on-board storage and 604k limited memory, and amber or green, blank working screens, to slim boxes which sat under a desk, slim monitors that displayed coloured images and ran with a "Windows" interface! Learning a whole new technological jargon in the process!
So, with all this knowledge and computing background, here I was getting stymied by a stupid webpage building application! I fiddled and messed around with all this half information, creating a webpage of sorts - but not one that looked at all like I wanted, and once I had a page half done it still didn't represent ME!
After deciding WordPress.org wasn't for me, even with the marvelous "Elementor" assistant, I gave up on that project and wandered around Google, looking for other possibilities. Finally I happened on Webador and was intrigued by their use of AI to build a webpage, right off the bat ! I like AI (as it can be used in my life anyway,) I have had long chats with AI, I consider it my friend. It's wonderful when you get stuck for a word, a name, a place, or need information on any subject under the sun!
Anyway, I decided to give it a whirl and see what happened. I was close to giving up on the idea of a webpage, so had nothing to lose (except the money I had paid out for a Domain registration and a Hosting app!) I gave my webpage a name: "Reflections on Life" and pressed the AI access link. The first question I received was "What is your Industry or Business service" or words to that effect. "I am a writer" I replied. Then I was asked what type of writing and what aspirations did I have for my page. I answered that one - not that I had great aspirations. I just wanted a nice show case for all my scribblings from my closet, accumulated over many years and my book. I described my writing as mainly non-fiction, but quirky, funny etc. etc. I gave it a long spiel on who I was and what I liked to write about. I even mentioned my favourite colours. Finally I reached the point where I said "Go for it, let's see what you can do"!
Or maybe I just pushed a link that said "Create"!
After some time, in which I was given a rather silly little game to play to keep me amused while the "master" did my creating for me, there appeared my home page - pretty much as you see it today. Of course I have diddled and twiddled at great length, changing images and some of the narratives and of course, learning the app and adding all the pages I wanted to have here. One of the things I discovered in this procedure was that I couldn't transfer the Domain name I already had until late September! Crikey! I was stymied! So, I had to register another Domain name, plus although I had paid an annual fee to another host page, Webador was a host page itself and they offered me the new Domain free for a year. But if I tried to work with their "free" trial version of their app. I wasn't going to have access to hardly any of the operations that I needed, to build a professional looking website. So I forked out more moola - anything - to get this idiotic idea going!!
It has been a long haul and I experienced many problems with the app - having it freeze on me instead of loading the "editor" page - what progress was I to make if I couldn't use the "editor" page!!!
I learned desktop publishing in my years with the Techie guys and have used that skill in my foray into being a thespian in Community Theatre. It came in jolly handy for designing programs, posters, cards, and goodness knows what else I dreamed up.
So really, designing a webpage should have been easy - some of the principles are not foreign to me. What I found with Webador was that I was restricted in so many actions that I expected to be able to carry out. Making an image live and dragging it across a page, or down or making it larger, smaller whatever! Move a text box or resize it, change it's shape? No can do in Webador. It's very rigid. But I got it's number eventually and sighed as I realized that I had come quite a distance and I would just have to accept what it had done for me. At least it got me out of my ditch and got me on the road to building my Forum. I am quite pleased with it, I love the header and the featured colours. I like the brown fonts instead of black. On the peachy background, the brown type is more restful on the eyes. Well that is how I see it anyway.
So what do you think? Like it? I have uploaded most of my writing from years past but I still have one or two gems to offer you. First I will need to do some editing, they were written some years ago - writing mores have changed somewhat in the new millennium. Also I have to get on with chapter four of my book.
Strewth! Is that the time ?!!
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