I’ve been splitting my time between writing, taking pictures, and building a new website.  These are all tasks which require me to use different parts of my brain in different ways.  It’s a miracle that I am still coherent enough to form these sentences right now.

Web designing is not for the faint of heart.  I have learned so much in such a short period time, but it’s been a straight up “pump and dump” kind of thing.  Remember back in school when you’d learn about something that you were confident you’d never use again?  You retained it long enough to pass the test or the class or write the paper.  Seriously, how often are you asked how to prove congruent parts of congruent triangles are congruent?  Or when was the last time someone asked you the Vice Presidents for Grover Cleveland, Millard Fillmore, and Chester A. Arthur?   SN: The answer there would be Adali Stevenson and Thomas A. Hendricks for Cleveland, and none for Fillmore or Arthur who were both Veeps that assumed the presidency upon the assassination of their respective presidents.  As for me, I didn’t really pay attention on how to draw perspective in art class.

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Remember those? Ugh, I couldn’t even make a straight line with the ruler, let alone get a house or a series of buildings to populate the page.  It’s hard to pump and dump artistic skill, but I passed art class, so I must have clung onto something and spit it back out on the paper.

These days,  I’m pumping my head full of info about how to build a webpage. I’ve been all up on my domain hosting site, using the domain name system, making sure my Internet protocol is accurately describing the server where my page will be.  I’ve learned html to make things centered, bold, italicized and forwarded to my email account.  I’ve learned just enough to get somethings done, but if I don’t keep it up, the minute I turn my attention to something else, anything else,  it’ll just slide right out of my head like water through a sieve.

I can remember doing something like this before.  When I built my first website for my photography, I scoured the chat room and help centers for information. I really wanted something short and to the point, concise answer, not long drawn out explanation.  I want to do X, tell me in five sentences or less how to do it.  I leaned heavily on tech support; I’m sure they hated to see my name pop up in the online chats.  The website got built. It wasn’t super fancy, but it was steps above just the name and an “Under Construction” icon.  Once the business started proving itself, I wanted to make some changes to our web presence.  I had totally forgotten how to do it.  I ended up cutting and pasting pages of code into a Word document and saving it so that if I completely broke the webpage, I could just cut and paste it back to normal.  Which is pretty much what I did.

I’ve taken sole ownership of the business. I want a different look to my web presence.  Ideally, I want to farm the whole thing out to someone I can talk to, face to face, and show my sketches and plans. I have pages of notes that I’ve taken on what I want my splash page to look like, how I want my galleries displayed and my blog integrated.  I’ve visited numerous hosting sites and template sites.  I’m pulling from all different directions to create this framework on which to hang my creativity. 

Oh, and I must remember to actually create something.

I’m a minimalist; I don’t want music or multi-colored pages.  I want to keep it simple so that you can focus on why you’re visiting my site: for my writing and for my pictures.  Conveying that on a website is trickier that you’d imagine.

I’m pumping information into a system that’s already overloaded.  I need an external hardrive for my brain.  There’s no reason why I should  still be able to quote whole scenes from the “Cosby Show” and yet, can’t string together simple code so that my welcome on my homepage is in 16 point underlined font.  Some nights find me sitting at the table, surrounded by papers, folders, power cords, and camera pieces.  For as much as I love order and everything in it’s proper place, I don’t feel like I’m in the thick of it unless I’m covered in the paraphernalia that goes along with it.  It’s those times that I want to just stick my hands through the screen and physically manipulate pieces of text and images and all the rest of it so it flows the way I want.  Instead of trying to find a photo-illustrator, a web designer, a graphic artist, and the money with which to do it all,  I want to hold my notes up to the screen and have them be absorbed.

Hmmm. . . I haven’t tried that yet and I did just get this SnowLeopard OS upgrade. . .