Me? A Webmistress?

Like I needed another project on my hands.

But I've gone and done it now. Committed myself to learning how to build a website. A year ago, when I had to learn how to run and manipulate stuff on LegendFire, it was a matter of studying the builders very simple and straightforward code and sorta reverse engineering things when I needed to make bigger changes. That familiarized me with the basics and everything that actually made a webpage happen. I found it fascinating that changing a little bit of code would produce dramatic results on the community page. (And I haven't broken anything irreparably yet.)

Then, after all the searching and questioning I underwent this last couple of months concerning my novel projects, I decided, for many reasons, that it was high time these ugly things got into print. Well, if I'm going to publish three huge novels myself, I need all the help I can get to sell a few stray copies. Thus, the website project. It'll be nice to advertise traditional publications there as well. Next step was to browse all the templates available. None served every need I envisioned, so I downloaded the one that I felt would need the least customizing, then...

I went to the bookstore and bought a tome the size of Texas: "HTML, XHTML, and CSS for Dummies." That's me all right. I'm forcing myself not to skip any pages and take the exercises one at a time. I found that when I skipped ahead to change fonts on my template that it didn't work, so obviously I missed something vital somewhere, so back to the beginning. In other words, this has been so much fun, a practical challenge for my brain that produces visual results, and that's rewarding. Nothing like brainstorming for a plot solution and writing it out and still being uncertain if it worked right. Oh, dear. And it's been ugly work brainstorming plot solutions to novels that are a decade old. But that's another post.