Sorry I’ve been missing in action (MIA) here for the last few days but had a rather harrowing thing happen with my blog. This saga began as a really long post, so I’m breaking it up into separate shorter post sections for easy reading.
If you are a regular follower of this blog, you can see that there have been many changes made to the look of the blog in the last few days. And I might add, those changes were not made entirely on purpose!
DIY Site Development/Designer Woes
I’m presenting this thread topic here as something for you NOT to do regarding your blog, in hopes you will learn from my mistakes. I’m sure these separate posts about what happened to me will be a big help for those of you new to the blogosphere. I really hope you NEVER have to go through this harrowing ordeal with your blog! Ouch!
Learning Code by the Seat of My Pants
As some of you might know, I taught myself HTML hand-coding of websites way back in 1999 when I began my domain site, WickerWoman.com and this was only one of the things I did as a business owner wearing many hats.
Here’s what my site looked like in the earliest recorded version of my site that the Internet Archive, Way Back Machine What a hoot, huh?
If you have the time, The Internet Archive or “Wayback Machine” is a great place to play, viewing all the older versions of some of your most favorite sites! Just get their site URL and plug it into the “Take Me Back” search input field.
In 1999 it wasn’t really that I had a profound urge to delve into and learn HTML coding, it was just that I was too broke to pay someone else to design and maintain a website for me!
Early Days of Website Coding
Way back then, there weren’t many fancy what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) templates with all the bells and whistles that are available today for the novice website or blog owner to use. Oh, and by the way, there weren’t even “blogs” back then, we all had websites, the term “blog” came into popularity much later.
In order to get a fairly good looking website in the very early days of the Internet, you had to do the HTML hand-coding yourself or hire it done. And at that time, paying someone $100 a page to design, and then another $35-50 a month to maintain, was just out of the question for me, I didn’t have that kind of money to throw around! .. continued on part 2
