Computers, Websites & Business. Oh My!

On March 5, 2013

As in OH MY GOD I hate .css and .php with the fiery passion of a thousand burning suns! Don’t know what those things are? Ha! Feel my pain, because neither do I! I think, during my website-building process, this intense hatred skittered through the dark, emotional recesses of my mind with a feverish nervousness. Daily. And, yes, I’ll admit I cried, accompanied by sailor swearing and the repetitious violence against computers, for which I’m still ashamed. Yet I persevered and created this moderately unimpressive site for your viewing displeasure. And it only took me two months! My husband would bring me tissues, Diet Pepsi and chocolate every night I settled with my laptop on the couch, then would leave the room in a hurried puff of expectation.

He was afraid I would throw things.

Smart man.

So where did it all begin? With my Etsy-induced disillusionment, of course. Their saturated wire-wrap searches and reseller support business model were all the convincing I needed. Plus they kicked me out. Meanies. So, from there, my work spiraled through blog posts, the purchase of a domain name, a contract with Bluehost and, yes finally, this frustratingly fun WordPress platform through which you are currently experiencing this very post.

WordPress is really where the journey culminates into a bubbling crescendo of cursing. This platform, in and of itself, was neither difficult to install nor navigate, but the possibility for things bigger and better were always consistently within grasp, and also consistently within the boundaries of ones understanding of web design. For me, those boundaries were so tightly wrapped around  “turn computer on & type” that I feared all would be lost.

Install WordPress platform. Check. Download and install themes and interesting plug-ins. Check. Import Blogger posts and upload images. Check. Customize website. WOAH, nellie! Slow down there! Where do you think you’re going with all that customizing nonsense? Want to change the color of your font? Well too bad! Because it’s all locked up tight in theme editors, with fancy words like stylesheet and php and back end ftp, which just sounds dirty and shameful.

And with nervousness creeping over me, I entered the theme editor, which looks like gibberish, but gibberish in parenthesis, so it’s all legitimate and necessary and… gulp…scary, and there I dared experiment by arbitrarily removing code and seeing what happened. If I didn’t like it, I put the code back where I found it, sort of like spitting food in a napkin and hoping the chef doesn’t notice. I learned fancy color codes (apparently called hexidecimal, though fancy is fewer syllables), and figured where and how to alter them utilizing my handy insert-and-run approach. And I got really good at it. If you needed to color a link purple, I was your girl! You could have painted me pink, I was so proud of myself. But things weren’t shaping up fast enough and who has the time to learn it all, except, you know, computer programmers. So I searched for a program that would do the job for me, and found Ultimatum Theme-Building Platform, which was supposed to utilize “drag and drop” technology to minimalize or eradicate the need for code.

I purchased the user license with an excited squee…. then spent two weeks trying to install the program to WordPress.  TWO WEEKS. During which time a program was recommended to upload the files to WordPress via the back end FTP program, and since I didn’t know what back end or FTP meant, I spent two days researching their purpose. Then the program I downloaded contained a damaging virus which I spent three days removing, but since I didn’t know how to manually remove a virus, I had to research that as well. Then I used my hosting service FTP program to upload the files, of which there are a kabillion, and my internet connection was unreliable, so the file transfer process was interrupted fourteen times during each 45 minute process. The Ultimatum support forum was a nightmare to access and their “Help” documents consisted of three out-of-date YouTube videos too specified to be of use. Once installed, I spent another week trying to figure out how to create a single page element. Just a title. I would have been happy with a title. But even that was denied me by the web design gods, those fickle beasts!

And that’s when I deleted the program, installed a generic WordPress theme, paid for the pro version (plus support), and my world simplified itself. Which is what happens when I pay someone else to deal with it for me. Thank you, money, for being so useful!

Now when I want to create or alter an element, I ask someone and they tell me and I do it, and that’s exactly how it should be!

Just wait until I tell you about the spam mail you can expect when you build a website! Oy vey! Yeah… it’s so frustrating, it calls for Yiddish.

But, until then, have a good evening and happy weaving!