Website Mania
As you have probably figured out by now, I have my blog hosted on my own domain, BGerdin.com. I’ve had this domain since, oh, the summer after my Sophomore year at Bethel. I distinctly remember sitting down in the blistering summer heat at what is the ITS Helpdesk with nothing to do, causing trouble with Mr. Bleess. I remember that he had recently acquired his domain of bleaus.net (be sure to check it out, it’s pretty sweet!) and I was really interested in having one of my own. It didn’t take long before I had decided on and purchased my very own domain. At the time, it made way more sense for Austin to have a domain because he was, at that time, a computer science major. Me, being the finance major that I was, really had nothing to do with and shouldn’t have even been thinking of having my own website. But alas, here I was with my very own domain.
I thought this was pretty cool, however, I had no idea what I was going to do with it or even how to begin working on it. Thankfully, I was surrounded with all the computer people that I would need to start my site and get it up and running. Also thankfully, Bethel provided all of their students with a copy of Dreamweaver on their servers. This handy piece of software became the life vest for me out in the ocean known as the internet. I started out with a blog and it slowly grew to include regular html pages that I painstakingly learned how to code. This was quite a task for me being that I had never coded anything in my life. I asked both my coworkers and W3 Schools a lot of questions as I went along. Over time I moved my blog back and forth a couple of times from being hosted on Blogger’s servers to being hosted on my domain. Finally, I think finally that is, I moved my blog back to my server and started using Wordpress to author my blog. I have never had any second thoughts since that move.
A couple years ago, equipped with my vast knowledge of website creation, I decided that I could help my dad create a website for Gerdin Auto. As you probably could guess, my knowledge is no where near vast when it comes to programing. You could probably figure that out pretty quickly by simply looking at GerdinAuto.com. Looking at that site now, it looks like a bad site from the late ’90’s. Bad, I know. But hey, I was having fun. I had made a website from scratch for my dad’s business. Pretty cool I thought. But, let’s be honest now, I’m not really sure that I want to be associated with the site any more. It is pretty lame. So, within the last six or so months, I decided it needed an extreme face lift. But how, and where would I even start on it? Those were two very good questions.
I just started to play around with what was currently there. I became frustrated with that pretty quickly because I knew that it was just awful. I hit a road block and didn’t really know where to go from there. So what I did was look around for websites that I liked and take some ideas from them for the new site. Since all of the sites that I looked at were in simple html, it was rather easy to look at their code with the simple “View Page Code” in Firefox and figure out what was going on. After searching for a while, I found a great site and started to completely redo the shops site using their code as a guide. Along the way, I have created a Wordpress page that will be incorporated into the site and have also been doing some work in flash to add some special enhancements to the page. Everyone that I have shown it to so far has been blown away with how much better it looks from what is currently up there. Really, it’s not very hard to get that reaction coming from the current page.
So that’s really been taking up a lot of my time recently. I’ve been learning some flash, fumbling around with php, and doing a lot of trial and error with good ‘ol html and css. After I get some more of the content ironed out, I think it’s going to be ready for world to see. But as of now, it’s still in beta. I’m really starting to be excited with how it is turning out. I don’t want to link to it here on my site, so if you want to see the work in progress, let me know and I’ll send you the link to the testing pages. If you check it out, you’ll have to send me some feedback so I can make it even better than it currently is.
Keep fumbling around with your web skills, you never know what will come out on the other side!