I’ve just spent many, many hours rebuilding my website. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, but never actually forced myself to make the many decisions involved, to learn new computer-things, and to go through the agonies of setting it all up. But basically it’s done, it seems to work and I’m happy I did it. This quick newsletter is to test that the mailout function works, and to invite you to have a look at the site. Please do send me your comments about how it looks, how it works, and what you might like to see added. Very many thanks in advance!!!
Drag & Drop - Couldn't Be Easier!
When everything’s well set up and working, the allure of a well-made website is such that you think it’s all very simple and easy to do. The brilliance of computer-codemen and -codewomen has enabled even laypeople like me to build their own websites without any code whatsoever. Using what’s known as “drag and drop” interfaces, you can basically put your site together like Lego. But it’s still intricate and precise and complicated and endlessly absorbing and often extremely frustrating!
Make It Light and Fast
My main aim in rebuilding my website was to increase the loading speed of the pages. This is because people tend to leave websites if they don’t load quickly. Also, a major factor in the search engines’ rating of your website is the speed with which it loads, especially on mobile phones. My website was using a rather older structure and ran very slowly. In order to work out how best to increase the speed of my site, I took advice from several computer people in the office where I earn my daily bread.
Above, you can see a screenshot of compressing the image for this post. At first the image size was 82KB. After compression it was 50KB. Actually the quality isn’t good so I should have worked on it more, to find a better balance between size (and hence, loading speed) and quality. In short, I realised I had to compress all the images on my website. (There were more than a thousand). Luckily there are ways of doing this automatically BUT it took me a while to work out the best way, and the one that wouldn’t cost me a huge amount. In desperation and confusion at some point I bought the completely wrong app (or “plugin” as they’re called in the website world) and had to struggle to get my money back……Just part of the endless fun!
Eventually, I rebuilt the site from scratch on the WordPress platform. I’ve been using WordPress for about ten years now so at least I understand how to use it. My new page-builder and theme is Elementor, which is similar to my previous builder but somehow finer and more sophisticated and it’s structured more clearly on the coding side, I understand. But it’s fiddly to work with at first and takes time to get used to. I could write a lot more about this, but I’m signing off now. Enough is enough. The site’s up and running, hopefully smoothly and fast, and I’m exhausted! Wishing you a safe and peaceful weekend and a Happy Purim if you’re celebrating……..Not much of a celebratory feeling around at the moment, I know……
