A short history of this website
Chele has always wanted her own website and blog, and as I, her hubby, was doing a TAFE course in website design, was given the task of getting it up and running. And a long, fascinating, frustrating, excellent hands-on educational learning curve it has been!
The TAFE course is very well suited to the task. There are two sections: one to research all sorts of useful information about developing and curating a website in all its myriad permutations and complications. The second is to build and launch then test and evaluate the site.
Hostgator Shared was chosen as the web host. Chele already had her domain registered with another company, but they would not allow users to design their own site! And Hostgator can’t or won’t register .com.au domains! So the first thing I had to learn was where to go to modify the name servers and DNS A records to point to the correct values. A few hours research and 5 minutes work but done.
Then the big decision -what website development platform to use? WordPress was the obvious choice, being mature technology, and with a plethora of theme templates available. Then a choice of theme, which Chele chose – the Creativo ‘Laura’ theme from RockyThemes (thanks to Stef for the prompt and valuable support BTW).
Since then it has been a massive learning curve of discovery of how WordPress works, and in particular the Creativo theme. Then there’s other Hostgator services like CodeGuard backup (and yes I have had to restore the whole site a couple of times – good to know it is reliable!), SiteLock security, JetPack, which release the power of WordPress.com. Then with WordPress there’s WooCommerce for the shop (still under construction), MonsterInsights for site analytics, Aksimet anti-spam, Contact Form 7, eCaptcha etc etc. And of course every site needs an SSL certificate.
There was a big diversion for a day or so learning that changes to the “Slider Revolution” plugin caused some unwanted changes everywhere on the site (my bad I think, and one of the reasons for a backup restore!) Eventually used a MetaSlider plugin for the slide show.
So now we are the stage where we can go “live” and I am quite nervous! It has to be done obviously, if only to run the tests and evaluation for the TAFE course.
There will probably still be pages with content inherited from ‘Laura’, and other unforeseen quirks. But it’s time!
17:31 2 July 2020.
