Updating My Website — aka Climbing Mt. Everest
Pardon me while I whine a bit.
As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, one of my summer goals is to update my website. This is a daunting task. I counted up how many pages I have on the site and there are over 130! The website is pitifully out of date in both style and content.
In terms of content, I don’t want to change much, just update stuff. The main page is sort of a response to Bush’s war on terror and I’d like the new site to reflect a more positive tone now that Obama is in office. Updating the content will be somewhat tedious (reviewing links, rewriting stuff, etc.), but that’s not entirely overwhelming to me.
In terms of style, I’m having a ton of problems. First of all, I have no idea what sort of look I want. Second of all, I’m hopelessly ignorant of the code required to present the look that I will eventually come up with. I built my current site (version 3.0) five years ago, which is a century in internet terms. In the mean time, Web 2.0 was born. I built my website on FrontPage and used tables to manage the layout with a little snippet of css to control font and link styles. This was a pretty lame approach, but I’m not a linear person and I totally suck at coding (I learned that from my time mushing/muxing), so it was the best option at the time. Today, tables are a nono. Bad code, clunky, passe.
So, I’ve been trying to figure out just exactly how to proceed since I can’t use FrontPage and tables anymore. Web 2.0 has opened a new world of possibilities, but I’m not sure I need a dynamic website. I’m pretty content with having a static website with the exception of my blog.
Nonetheless, several people have encouraged me to use some sort of CMS or content managing system since I have so many pages and since I’m planning on redesigning the whole shebang. I spent the past couple of days reading about Drupal, which is supposedly wonderful but not newbie friendly. Then there’s Joomla, which is supposedly easier than Drupal. Still, it looks complicated to me. Last is WordPress, which has been around since 2003. WordPress is primarily a blogging program, but many people use it for static websites. The process of setting up a static page seemed depressingly complicated.
In the end, I’m struggling with the basic decision of whether or not I need to use a CMS program. Apparently using a CMS will allow me to update both content and style with ease once I’ve done the front-end work of setting the damned thing up. This is appealing when I consider the 130 pages I have to deal with.
Once I decide about a CMS, I can start working on what sort of design I want. In addition to trying to read up on these programs, I’ve spent the past couple of days surfing for templates and themes amidst the endless bullshit harvested by google. I really hate when a website says it offers free themes or templates only to find that a) there’s actually less than a handful of free themes available or b) the site simply harvests templates from other sites, so you see the same ugly themes over and over again. Most of these themes are too corporate and use ugly, generic stock photos. Yet, the thought of hand coding a theme just overwhelms me.
Which leads to learning CSS and what sort of editing program I should use in order to build the site. I’m struggling between Dreamweaver, which I’ve used before and which I find to be very cumbersome since it really expects you to know something about code, and Style Master, which seems more newbie friendly but less functional. Willow has Dreamweaver and Style Master has a free demo and is only $60 thereafter.
Decisions, decisions. I have a headache.
And to top it all off, when Willow and I examined the code on my website so she could explain to me what exactly CSS would look like, we discovered that someone hacked into my site! There was a list of like 50 invisible links to all sorts of bizarro websites. I mean COMPLETELY hidden. I’m not sure how that happened or what those links were supposed to do exactly. The Hostrocket guy (I love them — they’re cheap and they have great tech support) said they probably used some sort of program to crack my password and that I needed to change it more regularly.
And so my trials and travails with computers and the internet continue. At least I have all summer to figure out this crap.
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