Website Under Construction

I have dove, or dived, or diven, or doved or launched into creating websites. We need three, so I thought it worth the effort to learn how. I did a lot of research, building on the foundation we layed or lay or laid when we took an HTML class back in the height of the dot com bubble while living in the Bay area. Just being there made us software savvy. But I digress.

Looking at the options for doing a website the right way, the way anyone who gives advice on such things would do it, I soon learned there are still barriers across which the un-tech masses cannot climb. Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Dreamweaver, Web Studio, and a host of other software packages that are the only way to create a website all remind one that profitability in the software segment continues to be obscene. How can software cost so much?

So have a look for "freeware" website building packages and you find several more choices, with cute and anti-Microsoft sounding names, Joomia, Homestead, Coffee Cup. Surely these offer at least one that will work. So I began downloading. I would have then started testing, but I could not figure out how to get to the first step. The byzantine instructions are dead simple to the in crowd of open source software development. But to me it was frustrating.

Not wanting to make one of those horrid and low-function web sites, I stubbornly resisted. Then I gave up. I used iWeb, built into my $79 suite of software called iLife, that includes iPhoto, iDVD, and some other things I don't yet use. Oh, Garage Band. OK, off we go.

It took a couple of nights to write the stuff we web masters call "content" and to find the photos to make it "come alive".

Phase One complete