I think it’s a sign of my general insanity that I become so frustrated trying to “pretty up” my website.
I know it doesn’t define me in any real sense, but, like a good haircut or a freshly pressed shirt, I want it to create a good first impression. I want to put my “best foot” forward. (My ADD wants me to explore that a little right now, but my Vyvanse will keep me on task).
There are hundreds of software products on the market to develop and maintain web pages. Some from established vendors like Microsoft and Adobe, and others on Open Source.
My problem is, that I never learned how to use any of them. After all, I rationalized, I’m an IT manager, or a Project Manager, or a consultant, or what ever job I held at the time, and I have no need to learn how to design and/or build web pages.
Yet here I am, in 2009, trying to “fix” the web pages that a friend of mine built on my website hosted by GoDaddy, www.pxkandassociates.com. You see, in 2004 when I was starting my own consulting business, I needed a website that reflected the professional image that I wanted to portray, but I had zero budget.
So instead of hiring one of the big firms to do this for me, I asked a talented friend for help and he designed and built my site for exactly the correct price. Zero. It fulfilled the old Hebrew proverb: “Cheap is good but free is better” (No offense is intended to any ethnic or religious group in the prior statement).
Now, I want to do it myself. Partly because my friend moved to Phoenix and no longer even uses a computer, and partly because I want to learn how.
Microsoft used to sell a product called Front Page. Or is that FrontPage. And, as apparently Microsoft loves to do, as soon as everyone got used to the product and really liked using it, they discontinued it and created something “better”.
I, of course, never learned FrontPage, but I have struggled along trying to do this.
Here are the methods I’ve tried so far (with between moderate and zero success):
> MS Word – Like driving a 10 penny nail into concrete with my
forehead – only more painful
> MS Publisher – Actually pretty successful but I don’t own a copy
and was using the copy at work
> KomPozer – A neat open source program for people who really could
just write the stuff in HTML and be done with it
> EvrSoft FirstPage – Another open source program that I couldn’t
even get to launch on Windows Vista Ultimate
So, as you can see, I’ve gotten about 3 feet off the ground, but not much farther. In fact, when I open my page today, it looks a lot different than it did when I previewed it in Publisher yesterday.
So what’s a poor guy to do?
I may have ot break down and actually buy something.
However, I’m loath to buy something I have never used. I don’t want to spend over $100 and not be able to use the product.
So I guess I either have to find a way to trial something new (the MS FrontPage replacement – Expression web), see if something old will run on my Vista OS, or actually buy Publisher.
My problem with the “buy Publisher” option is that I don’t want to buy a screwdriver when I need a tool to drive a nail.
So here I sit, with a whacked out web page (hit counters, links and text in the wrong places, funky layout, etc.
I guess that’s what I get for being a nearly-56-year-old mainframe geek in a webserver world.
