I am far from technically gifted. For a while I was convinced that computers internally combusted in my presence. I like to think that I’ve gotten past that point (sort of?).

However… I was pretty sure that this new website was going to be the death of me.

I had this idea in my head of what I wanted my website to look like. I can be pretty picky about things like that, and I’m the type of person who doesn’t want to put my name on something unless it’s perfect. Which is probably not great for starting up a business, but that’s another blog post. So there I was with grand illusions of what this website was going to look like. I started designing a logo, sketching things out, and falling asleep with a smile on my face dreaming of the day when I would have a website to call my own.

Fast forward two years.

The thing about making a website look exactly the way you want it to is that you either need to a) have the skill to do it, or b) have money to invest in a web professional do it for you. If you don’t have either of those, you have to be willing to compromise a little. A palatable middle ground seemed to be to pay less for a template and then rearrange it all to suit what I wanted.

Easier said than done, it just so happens!

I’m a “drag and drop” kind of gal. Who isn’t? I thought this template idea was genius. Just drag things around and drop in what you like! Right? Wrong!!! The template for this blog is from ProPhoto. I was expecting to get a nice little download package that included fonts and graphics. While I did download those things, they went right into ProPhoto, and weren’t available to use within Photoshop for the most part. This was fairly devastating for me, because the two main reasons that I picked this template were that the colour scheme was what I had envisioned, and the logo was almost exactly what I had already designed on my own. So I charged my credit card, held my breath in anticipation, opened the file, and… utter disappointment. There was no way to customize a logo. I turned off the computer and went to bed feeling like I’d made a terrible mistake and had just wasted a bunch of money. Thankfully, Rob told me to get some sleep and try again the next day.

Two Three months later, my website is up and running. Does it look exactly the way I wanted it to? Nope. Was the template easy to work with? From my technically-challenged standpoint, hell no! It involved a lot of playing around with things and jerry-rigging elements together in Photoshop. It involved a whole bunch of hours watching tutorials (which, to be fair to ProPhoto, were very well done). It took countless hours of trial and error, and me wanting to throw the computer out the window. Or quit. Which I did, several times. But I kept coming back to it, and here we are.

The site may change gradually over time, and there are still elements that need to be added, but for now I need a break. I’ve always had a lot of respect for web designers, and while I love to be independent and do things on my own, I would have traded almost anything to have some tech-saavy person over my shoulder pointing things out to me like I was a four-year-old. If anything, it might have been done in three days instead of three months.

So here it is! My new website with blog enclosed. Next step: decorating my office!