Construction time

I've spent a hectic day or so rebuilding my company's website. It was looking dated, and I've been mucking around with new website technology - in particular the pages option from WordPress - and thought it was time to bite the bullet. I'm seriously impressed with WordPress. I hadn't used the system before, and it was dead easy to install it on my server, with one click of the Fantastico button.

Next was a template. With literally thousands to choose from I found one that uses my corporate colours and has an ideal layout. Cost me all of $35. Came with instructions and a link to a video which explained it all beautifully.

Within three hours of making the decision to update, I had my four key pages up. I spent most of yesterday populating the site with portfolio items and other pages and doing final tweaking to text and layout. Half the time was spent going through all my work and selecting and editing key items for the portfolio.

A friend who recommended WordPress to me (he uses it to build sites for clients) pointed me in the direction of a contact form with anti-spam options and THAT installed with the click of a button. Very impressive. Having been used to FormMail and PERL scripts, it was a doddle.

My own business is 'business communications': websites, graphic design, copywriting and editing. I started it ten years ago when HTML was still the most common and affordable way to build a website for small businesses. I don't have the mental capacity to be a software engineer - my brain isn't wired that way - so messing around with java and other scripts hasn't been an option for me. I've been supplying people with robust HTML sites until now, but I'll be selling clients on WordPress from now on.

I now have a site which displays seamlessly on all browsers, shows off some nifty little sliders and other graphic devices, uses blog tags (on pages I select to use as posts rather than pages) to raise my SEO and in general looks 100% better than the rather swish little HTML site it replaced.

I'm a happy little bunny today.