All I want to do is write, but it turns out that to be a writer these days, you need to wear more than a few hats. One of those hats is Web Designer, which I think I’m finally starting to figure out. It’s been a steep learning curve though.
I’ve had this website for a little while, but when I first started writing on it, I was merely using it as a place to tease things out. To have a little bit of a public diary to explore some ideas. But now that I’ve published a book, am working on a second, and have a lot of other projects in the works, I’ve turned more attention to the website and found that I really needed to clean up a few things.
The Primary Concern
The main issue I noted was the gallery pages I have for each chapter of 4000s by 40. Formatting, misaligned photos, and missing headers were just some of the problems I saw. I also went cross-eyed when I originally put them together in a two-day blur, leading to multiple errors in the script. Part of that was because I was more focused on getting the pictures together than the text, and another part was because I only wanted to write a little segment about each chapter without giving everything away in the book. Not a typical writing exercise and therefore left a little something to be desired.
But I’m revisiting all of those now. Kind of the same way when you write a first draft of a book and go back and look at it with fresh eyes. I’ve got most of the pages cleaned up and “fixed” at this point, but of course they could always be better. At some point you just have to say, “good enough,” so you can focus on the other things you want to work on. But I think I finally have a website theme that works, I like how it’s organized, and I now know how to do things like CSS code in order to customize the site if I want. Score one for ChatGPT helping me learn how to code.
The WordPress Dashboard—what is all this stuff?
It’s Getting Easier
I’m not ready to be a programmer, but with some of the modern tools like ChatGPT, and plugins from WordPress to give you what you need to set up a site, it’s getting easier to juggle this whole Web Designer role so I can spend less time doing that, and more time writing. But it has been a ton of work getting it up and running. Figuring out SEO and metadata is a month I’d like to get back. I’m guessing that if I didn’t have this website, I could have probably written a whole other book by now… hey wait a second.
But I suppose if I didn’t have the website, then less people would know about my writing. It’s all a catch-22, so I’m learning to accept that when we say we want to be a writer these days, it means a whole lot more than just writing. Web Designer is just one of the many other roles you might have to take on.
Becoming a Writer
As I keep learning the ins and outs of becoming a writer, I like to share what I’m working on along the way. If you’re on your own writing journey, you can find more posts like this over at In Writing. Cheers!