Web design can be fun, provided you have a clue of what you are doing. When I started out on this campaign to put up a website, I had no knowledge at all. If you’re thinking of ever designing a website, keep reading. I’ll warn you of some of the little hassles and pre-planning you must do before you ever start. Otherwise you get yourself in all sorts of trouble before you begin.

I started out with just enough knowledge to know that there were several programs that could help make web design easier. And the one I chose was WordPress. And then I jumped into WordPress and just started writing posts and pages before I really understood the workings of a website. And those workings are things like how your website looks to a search engine like Google, or Bing, or Yahoo. WordPress is not an entire program, it is a website information collection database. Or something like that. So you can use WordPress just like a word processor, accept it produces HTML code. If you want your website to be anything like a interactive website, you have to add a lot a little programs to WordPress that do things. These are called plug-ins if they do several things, or widgets if they just do one thing.

Now if you get a WordPress theme, it usually comes with plug-ins and capabilities that gives you a head start on a great website. Almost everyone starts out with a theme. Most of the themes are blog post themes. But you can add additional pages to expand your website into an interactive place versus just blog posts. What I have seen and read about websites, and I’m no expert, is that the basic bloggers post website has a main page with selected post articles and then each post has its own separate dedicated page. So your main page may have several snippets of different posts, and then if you add other pages you can have totally different things in them. Such as a gallery of photographs or and interactive map of places you’ve been. Or, like I have, a page for shopping. Posts can be boring like this one, or posts can be interspersed with photographs of great places you’ve been, or things you’ve done, or people you’ve met. Learning how to format posts can be a slight learning curve. My advice is mix up your post with a lot of things like photos and paragraphs and an videos and then click on the formatting buttons to see how it changes the look of the post. I read four books before I had all the explanations of what the formatting buttons do.

But before you even start to post, before you actually publish live your website, you must consider how search engines work and what significant design features will be in your website to make a search engine find it easier. The name of your website should be short and sweet. If it is less than 15 letters it’s ideal. And then the title of the website should also be short. The reason for this is that the search engines typically take the website address and the website title and put them together as the main search key. But they don’t like to take more than 60 characters. And for each post or page you make for your website, they append that on to your website address and title. So if you have a address like “Great-Cars-of-North-America-and-the-US.com”, and the title of your blog is “Great American Eight Cylinder Muscle Cars from Detroit“, you’ve already got more than the search engines can absorb. A better strategy would be to name the website “USCars” and title the blog “Eight Cylinder Muscles”. Then each individual blog post could append to that with things like “Mustangs”, “Corvettes”, or something similar to that.

The other thing that I learned was that the way you name/title your posts is very important. Like originally I thought it would be easier to make the address of each post according to the date it was posted. But of course search engines aren’t interested in dates of posts, so my posts weren’t being tagged by search engines. As a result I had to go in and change the link addresses for each post from the date to a descriptive name. So naming each post with a short descriptive name is very important. This is called the “Permalink” of the post. I also found out that if you don’t have a title for your post before you start writing it, WordPress assigns a Permalink like “123-4”. And that’s no better than a date to a search engine. You set up the permalink naming convention in WordPress under the settings and tools menu. If you’re not interested in a lot of people finding your pages then maybe a date or a number would be fine, but if you’re looking to attract  viewers you need to plan it out a little more. All of this is called “S E O” which stands for “Search Engine Optimization”. And usually it is a plug-in that has to be set up to work best for you.

In my own journey down the road to building my website I have changed my website title about four times, and have started custom editing all my Permalinks so they fit in the ideal web search format. Just in case you hadn’t noticed. So far, while the initial website design and posting has been a little frustrating, I’m having fun learning all the intricacies of website appeal. Now I know when I search for something like a “Claw Hammer” and from the 25,000 links that appear, none are from Ace Hardware or Sears, it’s because there permalinks are numbers instead of descriptions. I guess they should of hired a better web designer. I still haven’t quite figured out how to get a page of downloadable files. That I’m hoping to figure out over the holiday break. If I do you will soon see a lot of files on how to do planning and modifications to an Aliner A-frame Trailer.

I hope this wasn’t totally boring. And I hope that it might explain why some of my posts have been so frustrating. The boys are bugging me to do more, and I’m sure we’ll get out and play in the snow which should make some interesting videos if I can keep the camera from being ruined.