building my website

I am about to start rebuilding a Web site. My ISP (the very good Exetel) gives each subscriber 200 MB of Web space that you can use or not as you wish.

Of ocurse, as a compulsive fiddler with things computer-based, especially software, photo-sharing Web sites and the like, I jumped to use some at least of my space (which reminds me, I keep away from the social Web sites such as MySpace). This was when we came down to New South Wales in 2005 and chose to find another ISP rather than Bigpond/Telstra.

In these five years, I have not done much with the site I laboured to set up. I say laboured, as I wanted control of the design, so set about learning as much HTML as I could. Even then, I used the format from one of the ones provided as examples in the fat book I acquired (excellent book, by the way – Web Publishing with HTML and XHTML, written so well by Laura Lemay). This dormant Web site is http://home.exetel.com.au/alvason – you can have a look there but I am not proud of the contents.

Now that I am determind to rebuild it, I run across a weird thing – when you retire you begin to find it difficult to find the tine to do things. Of course we all slow down when we retire, damn it, that frenetic pace at work was killing us. But when you retire, I think you find so many more interests that it is not all tall difficult to fill in the day. Quite the opposite – I want to do this Web site reconstruction from scratch but that means I have to learn so much to do it to look like something I would like and be proud of. Plus there is the overall design aspect – I would have to give consideration to the look, feel, layout, colours, images of the whole site. Wow. Not enough time.

So I am going the easy way and using a free template I downloaded frfom m some site – I have already forgotten which! At least then I am off to a flying start. Here is a screen shot of the one I have chosen in the Web editor I am going to try out – PageBreeze.

My downloaded template in PageBreeze Web editor.

(I used to use HTML Kit, but I think you have to pay for that now …) (Nah, HTML Kit is still free in its basic version. When I get this going, I will look more carefully at how to do it. I do think it best to get a flying start with a ready-made template, as long as I can understand how that template was used.

I will report progress.

Here’s a picture just for fun:

A greyscale image of a hibiscus.