Before Christmas I decided that this year everyone would get a locally created present, preferably made by one of my friends. I knew that I have a few friends who create and sell their own work as a living and as a hobby, so thought it would be easy.
Step 1: create FB status asking everyone who makes stuff to post their website/page/details so I could go shopping from the sofa.
Step 2: forget about it, then be unable to find specific post, resulting in more forgetting and eventual too-late-ness. Woops.
Step 3: decide that it was a great idea, but something better is needed than trusting to FB status’ to remember everything for me.
Step 4: spend 2 hours in the bath with some 92% ebony dark chocolate, and realise what I need is a web page. A web page! My own web page, with all my friends on it, and may be some of their friends who also sell cool stuff.
Step 5: spend a few hours searching the web for free, easy to use programmes to make a web page, resulting in this: littlegifts.moonfruit.com
Initially it took a good half an hour to work out the programme, but it’s very drag and drop, and I soon got used to it. Hurrah!
And that was going to be it. I put my mates, added a few others they recommended, and was preparing to forget about it till November until …
Step 6: Have everyone who knows anything about web-type-stuff say that I really really really should look at getting it on WordPress instead. It’s better. I can do lots of awesome things with it. And it’s better.
But I didn’t want to do anything else with it. It’s not the quickest site to update, but it is incredibly simple.
Step 7: Start thinking about all the other things you could potentially do with it … oooooo … and possibly a bit of ahhhhhh ….
Step 8: Crumple under the pressure and start spending hours fighting with WordPress. And the main reason I couldn’t work out how to do it, was that THE ARE TWO VERSIONS OF WORDPRESS that no-one ever mentions. “It comes in two flavors: the fully hosted WordPress.com, and the self-hosted version available at WordPress.org“. It didn’t say that anywhere while I was trying to find a ‘plugin’ menu on a programme that didn’t support them, because everyone calls them both ‘WordPress’. AAARRRGGGGHHHHH. Anyway, if you’re interested in the difference, see this.
Step 9: Call in the big guns. I complained to my big brother that WP was crap, who then threw a site together for me to play with in about half an hour, and when I finally agreed that it would be better he bought me a domain name for it 🙂 AWESOME. So, I now have www.somelittlegifts.com which at the moment just points to the Moonfruit site (which I recommend for anyone wanting a wisiwig site to build a basic page idea) while I wrestle with the beast that is WordPress. Keep an eye out, as it’s coming soon ….