Website Coming Along Nicely

Well, I have made some good strides forward on the website. I am learning a lot. The thing that seems to take the most time so far is the layout. There is really no way around it. You have to take the time to think it through and to think about how many layers deep you are going to go. I am realizing that this could be very time consuming... and that it will be easy to make mistakes that will leave buttons unlinked and stuff like that.

Yesterday I created the second-tier pages for the website and learned how to link them to the homepage. Today I did the layout for the second-tier page for Real Estate and created one set of the third-tier pages for that section. Tomorrow I'll be working on the second (and the much larger) set of third-tier pages for the Real Estate section of the website.

I started working on the news section of the site yesterday, but discovered that I didn't like the format of the newsreader that I have. I'm going to have to find one that has a better layout. I also have to find some search code to help people find what they are looking for - especially on the real estate part of the site. I have a module in the bundle that I got with my web hosting, but I don't know if it will do what I want. This would be so much easier if I knew HTML.

Of course, there is the concern that I may be doing all of this using much more memory and bandwidth than is necessary (or prudent). And there is the nagging conviction that I am probably doing some of this the hard way. That was definitely the case 2 days ago, when I had to manually lay out a grid on the worksheet to assist in my layouts. (I had to do it manually because there isn't an automated way to do it, but I ended up sticking with laying out every 10x10 pixel block far longer than I needed to.) I abandoned that approach today and things went a bit faster.

I showed the site design to my dad yesterday and he was really shocked by what I had accomplished. It was very gratifying to receive his praise for what I had created.

Well, I will be continuing on. My goal is to have a functional website done by the end of the month. Perhaps that is a little aggressive and optimistic. I hope not. I need some revenue!

Thanks for reading and thanks for your comments. Have a blessed day!