This is a post I’m writing that no-one’s going to see straight away.
One of the challenges on my list of 60 things to do before I’m 60 is to get my own website. There are a couple of reasons why this is on there. One reason is pleasure and a sense of self-achievement. I enjoy using the internet for all kinds of things and I like to understand the things I’m interested in. By creating my own website I’m developing a better understanding of how things work on the web and this insider knowledge enables me to use the web more effectively.
The second reason is more practical. I want to write, travel and generally spend more of my time doing things that I enjoy. Having my own business (or at least being able to generate some of my own income without having to work for it through regular jobs) is one way of achieving this. And of course, every good business needs a website these days doesn’t it?
A few years ago I attended night-school and spent a couple of terms learning web-design. This was really useful and I learnt a lot, but didn’t actually do anything with it at the time. I’ve now decided the time is right to turn my blog into an actual website.
Setting up the basic site, buying hosting, getting a domain name and so on, was all really easy. I imported WordPress, partly because this is what most websites and blogs seem to use now and also because I already had my blog in WordPress.
So far, so good. All I had left to do was choose a theme. This should have been the easiest bit, but for some reason all the themes I tried wouldn’t display correctly and I was getting some really bizarre looking layouts. I’ve ended up going with the basic WordPress theme for 2016 which I do quite like, though I was hoping for something that looked a bit more ‘websitey’ rather than ‘bloggy’.
I’m now tweaking and checking everything and writing up a few posts offline to make sure all is well. I’ve noticed that some of my photos on previous posts haven’t transferred across in the original layouts, so at some point I’ll have to go back and adjust them. This isn’t my biggest priority at the moment though. I still have lots of unfinished posts sitting in drafts that I really want to get finished and posted.
What will I use my website for other than a glorified blog? I’m still working on that, but I feel good about having a foundation to build on. And it’s one more challenge completed.
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