Producing a new website is a stressful thing. It should not be. It should just involve hiring a brilliant web designer (every one of whom I'm aware is busy) and feeding them content. Then, magically, the website appears online.
That's not how it went down for me this last time.
I happen to know the first thing about html. It's the second through ten-thousanth thing that throws me off a little. I know that you use brackety things... <, and />, to do stuff. That's the first thing. What I don't know is how to keep the website from completely falling apart and throwing pixel-boogers at the screen when I go to render it.
I remember talking to a young web designer many years ago. He was a kid then. He told me, "I can't spell, they told me so in school and so I have a disability..." I remember asking him, "how often do you make spelling errors in your code?" The answer was of course, "never". He was, and still is, brilliant. I rediagnosed him as not having a spelling disability, he just didn't care. I'm the opposite. I hold my own with spelling (though, "rediagnosed" isn't a word). It's language of html that has me over a barrel.
So after a solid week of this and that, including "just plugging in a template and replacing all the content..." a thing I thought would be easy, I have a new website. (
www.loudouros.com) It's not perfect, and I can't take any credit for the coolness of it. But it's functional. Someone asked me, could you make this bar a different color? Nope. Or... can you move this text to over there? No, again. Someone else, what about that font? It stays. I can't care anymore. Sure I'm calling warts, beauty-marks, what of it?
Here's the thing though. I've worked with web designers before. They become these nags that call you four times a day and tell you there's not enough pictures (that you don't have) or text (that you haven't written) or social media links (none of which you subscribe to...yet). So, four times a day, you race around your assets looking for stuff you don't yet have. That was why I decided to do it myself. "I'm going to race around looking for assets anyway, I might as well not be nagged..."
There's this thing, nagging actually produces a better product. I've realized that the web person who knows exactly how to
things is the person I want worrying about making those things work in the first place. And that is why next time I have to do this, I'm just going to hire a nag. I will either pay in lost sleep and geeky YouTube tutorials that might make sense if I played Dungeons and Dragons in college, or...I will pay by slavery to the next lucky web designer with whom I contract to get my back on my site.
On the upside, now if I have to change "its" to "it's", I can do it without the worse of two evils... my nagging the web designer to do it.