Wouldn’t you rather be the owner and manager of a website for your business?
After growth and stability were established on my artist’s blog, and my skills had developed for managing multiple blogs, I wanted a static website. A website would present my Bio and Resume of accomplishments as well as display my art for sale. As I considered the design, I visited many artists’ websites. I considered ease of layout and available access to information a priority. My intent was to showcase my art to encourage interest, but I wanted an uncluttered, straightforward appearance.
An artist’s blog is fun and lively with lots of inspiring areas of “discovery”. But my website required sophistication and structure.
My husband and several friends worked with website designers to set up their websites. These designers became the managers of the website with certain controlling actions that only they could execute; thus, multiple headaches for the customer. The business owner couldn’t update or make changes for a majority of strategic items.
With my technical skills, I considered that I was able to design, manage and control my website directly. I studied the opportunities available, bought books on website design and took an HTML & CSS code computer class. I evaluated many template setups and talked to a couple of my tech savvy artist friends that had chosen a similar direction for recommendations.
With, my homework done it was time to dive into selecting my host network, ULR name and address, and the template to begin! I chose a WordPress template and spent several intense days getting my website designed, loaded, and running. The nerve-racking part was the site is live to the public as soon as you begin–scary thought–so you want the site to look as good as possible right away! Some may choose to lock the website screen to read “Under Construction”, but I didn’t want to take the risk of locking up any part of my website. I followed YouTube tutorials to guide me through the process and to cover all the hidden steps efficiently and effectively.
So, who owns my website? I do! And you can too!
Resource List:
Content Management Systems
• http://www.toptenreviews.com/business/internet/best-content-management-system-software/
• Top 10 Most Usable CMS by Glen Stansberry. This post is from 2009 but still helpful.https://code.tutsplus.com/articles/top-10-most-usable-content-management-systems--net-6493
• WordPress https://wordpress.org/
• Drupal https://www.drupal.org/
• Joomla https://www.joomla.org/
• Expression Engine https://ellislab.com/expressionengine
• Tyler Moore https://www.youtube.com/user/Conutant
She has independently published a collection of 24 artists’ interviews entitled the Artists Interview Series. The series was also published as articles for an online news network and on her website: Deborah Lyn Stanley - Writers Blog. Deborah is published in magazines. She is a blogger who has managed several group sites including ones she founded.
“Write your best, in your voice, your way!”
3 comments:
Deborah, great advice. I've been preaching the benefits of owning your website for a while now. It's a shame when authors or writers hire someone to build their site with the agreement that the service will also manage the site.
which creates unnecessary costs. Aside from the deal with free hosting and paid hosting through service like Bluehost and GoDaddy.
Sorry, but I saw a grammar typo, and had to delete the comment first. Content is identical with the one I had to remove earlier, just with corrections done. :)
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