Happy 37th birthday to me!
As a birthday present for myself, I decided to finally finish getting my WordPress site live. I’m writing this before it goes live, so fingers crossed that the final bit actually works!
I’m not a web designer, I’m completely self taught, muddling along over the years.
Way back in the day, my blog looked as unprofessional as they come, with a stock template available for free on Blogger.
Over time, I learned how to change my theme on my blog, using different templates, and it got better and better looking.
About 2 years ago I decided I really needed to revamp my blog, and that was when I made the new header for my blog. But that wasn’t all I wanted. I didn’t just want a website where you scroll and scroll and scroll to see posts as is the standard on Blogger.
I wanted something where I could have different categories of posts, where you could see the latest post in each category, to make my site easier to navigate and just more appealing.
I found one template that looked like it would work, but it didn’t show the thumbnails. I tried work around after work around but it didn’t work. So I tried another template. Again, the thumbnails didn’t work. I tried asking friends to help, but they didn’t succeed. I tried paying someone via Fiverr to fix it, but despite his working a while he didn’t fix it at all. I paid the people who built the template to fix it for me, and still they didn’t.
Basically, my site has looked terrible since then, about a year ago, with broken widgets on the front page that don’t show thumbnails. It made it look like my site isn’t a proper site, and I got people emailing me asking to buy my site for 100 bucks because it obviously was being neglected.
No, the problem was Blogger.
Most websites use WordPress. WordPress just costs money to host it, and it isn’t super cheap. It isn’t ridiculously expensive either, but when I started my blog, I barely had the ten dollars to pay for the domain name, let alone the hosting fees WordPress cost, so I made mine on Blogger, which had free hosting.
The problem is that Blogger is far inferior and most people who train as web designers use WordPress. Because of how much Blogger sucks. As I discovered when I tried to improve my website. And got nowhere.
But I knew that moving my site to WordPress would be such a headache, and it was so daunting that I’d put it off for many years, even after I could afford to pay the hosting fees. But I finally bit the bullet and said enough was enough, and paid for WordPress hosting, and started the process of moving my blog over to WordPress.
For various reasons, including the fact that it was a ton of work to get 15 years of posts and 4000 posts over to a new host, as well as life getting in the way, it has taken me six months to actually get this live on WordPress, and it took a team of 4 people, myself, my friend Penina, my friend Babs, and my son Lee, each of us doing a different part to get it live.
I’m really excited about it and hope you’ll find it much more easy to navigate and just a much more pleasant user experience.
Thank you for your patience while my site was going through these changes!
