I guess you can teach an old dog new tricks. For example- a long time ago- I paid someone to create my website. I was super excited about the layout and the look- and then the unspeakable happened. The domain (not Godaddy) that hosted my website crashed and the owner went out of business. Devastated, I felt hopeless because I had NO clue on how to fix the issues with my website. After several years, I decided that I needed to try again.
Two years ago was the first attempt at rebuilding the website. I sucked! I cried out in frustration and kicked myself many times. Finally, after a year of attempting to redesign my site to look exactly like the one that crashed, I mentioned this to a friend and guess what her husband design websites.
Yes, my prayers were answered we set a date to talk about the website and in the course of the conversation he said “Instead of designing the site- I’m going to teach you how to design it yourself” My first thought was “Oh no!” Followed by “Why?!!!!” While I was screaming this on the inside- I put on a brave face and said “Okay”. So we went to work. After he finished- I was proud of what I accomplished. Set it aside and kept writing- after all that’s my passion.
Then I went to the Writer’s Digest Conference and one of the topics covered pertained to marketing and website. Was my website up to snuff? Well it turns out the answer was NO! It was too stagnant. Had to many pages. Wasn’t that exciting- too many words aka wordy by the time my critique was finished (which by the way was only 10 minutes) I wondered what DID I DO RIGHT? Dejected, I walked away like a puppy with her tail between her legs.
After procrastinating for a while, I cracked open my C-panel, and guess what- everything looked like gobble de gook to me. I closed it. I looked for the notes that I had taken and strangely enough that too looked like gobble de gook. Sigh- this was going to be harder than I thought. It took a while longer (Note: writing is a great distraction- looking for an agent, a publisher, deciding if I want to continue to self publish all took my mind off my website) but I finally decided to sit down and decode this gobble de gook. My friend said “of course I will help” but I knew somewhere in my mind and heart that my PRIDE would not admit that I FORGOT everything. LOL.
Eventually, I figured it out and was back in business- i.e. 3 weeks ago- the conference was last year. I still have two errors that I really need to figure out how to fix but I might just suck it up and ask. I came this far and only an idiot would not ask for help. So stay tuned- the next blog post To be or NOT to be an IDIOT!