Well, I finally did it. I broke down and rebuilt my website using WordPress. The old website looked nice, but it was dreadful to edit. Never use a website template made entirely from an artist’s photoshop rendering of what they think a writer’s website should look like. Every time I edited it, the slices would scatter all over the place, and rebuilding it was almost impossible. I got tired of trying to make something work, that just was never going to unless I sacrificed more than I really wanted. There were so many compromises in that site I just couldn’t live with it another moment.

So now I am halfway into building a new website, and I would like to crawl under a rock and die. (have you ever felt like that?) Making a website is hard enough work, making one twice is agonizing. Save yourself some time and make yours right the first time. Use WordPress. Find a decent template and make your website. It will look pretty decent, and it will be easy to update.

Since there are many different paths you can take, and many different ways of making websites, I’ll just pass along what I’ve done and why it worked or didn’t work. I don’t pretend to be some expert or “guru” but I have done a lot of things so far, and I’ve learned a lot. Hopefully you can learn from my mistakes and I can save you some of the pain and aggravation I have gone through.

I will say that I’ve been making websites since 1996 and I’m very familiar with Dreamweaver and Fireworks, (not to mention a whole lot of software that’s no longer around any more.) I am very comfortable with html, css, seo, and a bunch of other acronyms I won’t bother dropping. Suffice it to say, I’m going to stick with WordPress for now. It’s free and easy. Why learn all the other stuff if you don’t have to? (I probably wouldn’t have)