New website!

In April I moved my website to GoDaddy.com after a conversation with a friend where she said she absolutely loved it, and the prices were good.  I looked into it and got a great deal where I paid for three years for just over the cost of two years with my old provider.  My renewal with that provider was coming up, so it was perfect timing to move.

I was able to get my current site (written by hand in XHTML) up relatively quickly.  Here's how that looked:

 
It worked well, but I wasn't happy with the mobile site.  The CSS that handled the graphics behind the scenes wasn't working too well, but I didn't want to dig into why because I knew I wanted to change to the "fancy" way of writing websites using a content management system (CMS).  Basically, what that means is that other people have done all the heavy lifting, and all I'd have to do is write words, pick pictures, and link things to menus.  I also want to add an online store, and I couldn't easily do that with my current site.

There are a number of those out there, and today I tried three of them before settling on WordPress.  It's not just for blogs anymore!  I had a lot of problems with the other two systems I tried - Drupal was too complicated for me, and Joomla had an odd error with adding menus.  I called GoDaddy for help with the menu error, and she convinced me to go to WordPress.

Even though it's simpler than writing the code myself, there is an awful lot of work to be done.  I had some problems, but so far I've been able to fix them all myself.

Right now I have all the functionality I had before, plus some extra things like a drop-down menu and links to most of my social networking.  It also looks a lot better on my phone, although it isn't ideal.

Here's how my website looks right now at 10:07p Central time on May 13, 2014:

(I gave the date and time stamp because I could modify it at any time)

Yes, I'm keeping the flowers.  I think they're cute, and I spent a ton of time making the graphic so the tiling works!

You can see on the top right all the little squares.  Those link to my social networking, and you can e-mail me.  Everything else is self-explanatory.  I'm not positive the contact form from the Contact menu works yet.  Steve and I sent messages through it, but I haven't received them yet.

Next up is an online store!

Click here to take a look at the whole thing.  Leave me a comment and tell me what you think, please!