Site Rebuild

Hi All,

I’m rebuilding this page and will be working on it now and in the future.  Thanks for your patience. I’ve had some negative experiences with the web developer and host I was using.  Because of that, I intend to write an article on building a website and how to choose the people who will guide and help you with it.  To me, building a website is far more complicated than what you may read about in articles with titles such as, “build your own website in minutes!”  Perhaps sharing my experiences with be of help.

Briefly, I can say that there are components that are interrelated, but should be kept separate.  Much like musicians.  Just because you are a musician doesn’t mean you are adept at playing all instruments, or that you have expertise in all facets of music.  A church organist may not be familiar with how to write for harp.  An oboist may not be familiar with trumpet repertoire.

With websites, there are many facets from choosing your domain name to adding a widget that automates subscribership. We have a harp store and harp publishing company.  Our main website was hacked and blacklisted by google.  Sucuri fixed it to a point, and it limped along while I took the initiative to build a new site on my own. 

The steps I took:

1 – acquire domain name – easy

2 – find host – easy

3 – choose platform – easy

4 – get started with tutorials – easy

5 – add content – easy

6 – find plugins to do what I need – easy

7 – make the site look inviting and yet be functional – ROAD BLOCK!  Big Road Block.

This is where I should have looked for a “designer” not a “developer”.  I did not know about “elementor” and now that I am familiar with it, I am moving forward. Elementor is a plugin [a plugin is an component that you add to your site if you need specific or additional functionality] that helps you make your site look inviting and yet functional.

There is more, though.  I have about 3000 products and many have variations.  All have multiple images.  My images were not showing up uniformly.  That was the big issue.  The “developer” I was working with touted his great abilities, yet he could not solve that problem. My site went down because the images replicated at an unbelievable rate due to a plugin that he installed.  I was wasting great amounts of time resizing all my images.

So back to the Elementor site.  On their forum, I asked for a tutor.  I just wanted to understand how to make this work.  I found a great tutor and wish I would have found her months prior.  Had I known there was a difference between a designer and a developer I would have saved a ton of time, frustration, stress, anxiety and money.  

It so happens that the tutor I found also fixed my image issue with some CSS (another thing that is way beyond me.)

My original developer has flaked out.  Fortunately I had the foresight to move my e-commerce site to a new hosting environment where my newly found tutor has cleaned it up and made it run pretty smooth. But I still lost 3 personal sites including this one, and am rebuilding them. They are literally being held hostage.

If your developer talks up a storm about how great he is, don’t hire him.  In fact, run fast in the other direction. Take your time in finding someone who will teach you how to make changes in your site and create the functionality that you desire.