STICK TO WHAT YOU KNOW

They say every day you learn something new. I'd pretty much agree with that, though in my case "learn" should maybe be changed to "utterly confused by".

I'm in the middle of a major new project, which is top secret for now. All will be revealed later in the year. It's pretty exciting stuff, if not a little scary, but part of the process is creating a website.

Now, what I know about creating a website could be written on the back of a matchbox, or even a postage stamp. I guess it depends how small your writing is. But I know a few people who do know the ins and outs, and they do say, if you are not an expert at something, get someone in.

My contribution is on the creative side; the images and text. But I'm a designers worst nightmare, because I know what I DON'T like, I just don't know what I actually want.

But I will when I see it.

The starting point has been to browse "themes" using something called Wordpress, which I have heard of, which is a good start I thought. Anyway, apparently you can choose a theme, and then alter it to your hearts content. Sounds easy enough, until I entered a word into a search box to find associated themes, and was presented with 763 examples!

And yes, I did look at every single one.

Unfortunately that had the effect of me choosing "anything", just so we could get started. I think my brain just kept looking because my website didn't turn up. Well that's because I haven't created it yet!

Two weeks on and finally, and only because of the saintly patience of the friend who is building it all, we are starting to make progress. Our deadline for launch on the 9 April is looking a tad shakey now though.

New language has entered my world. Phrases like, "static HTML pages" and "Joomla and Drupal database driven content management". Haven't a clue what any of that means but it sure sounds complicated.

It's also fun to watch my friend get excited when a page of code pops up! To me it's just nonsense. Lines of dots, dashes, stars, hash signs and words that are not even words. I take my hat off to anyone who understands that stuff. When I ask if a photos can be made a different size, or a button made a particular colour, I'm told that's easy. Just an alteration to a line of code.

Yeah. Easy!

I think I'll keep in mind what my very first employer told me, after just one week of work, back in 1979: "stick to what you know and leave the rest to us experts".