After three years, it was time to redesign my Web site.
The Internet moves remarkably quickly, and a Web design that looks great one day will appear stale the next. Certainly that had happened to my own site. While it still worked, it didn’t seem to have the cutting-edge design found elsewhere on the Web.
And when the Web is your business, you’ve got to walk the talk.
Still, when it came to redoing my site, there were some challenges. First, I wouldn’t be able to come up an adequate design on my own. I’m miserable when it comes to artistic skills — I suspect I may have failed art in kindergarten.
Second, I wanted to make use of some of the key design concepts — touches such as “rollover menus,” for example. That’s where you move your mouse along an icon and a menu drops down.
Third, after the site was put together, I wanted to be able to manage it myself. I wanted to be able to add pages, make changes and keep the site fresh.
It was easy enough to deal with the first two issues. An outside Web design firm created the look and structure for my site, based upon my ideas of where I wanted to go. It took just a little bit of back and forth until I got what I thought was a great workable design.
Dealing with the third issue was a little more challenging. For years, I had been maintaining my site using Netscape, which happens to have a built-in Web editing feature. Yet it is a very rudimentary tool, and I knew it wouldn’t be up to the task of a new site.
So what did I do? Adopt the philosophy of using the tool the experts use. Over the past year, I had become aware that a lot of the best Web designers were using MacroMedia’s Dreamweaver program (http://www.dreamweaver.com).
If that’s what the experts were using, then so would I.
I’ll admit I was a little intimidated. At first glance, the program looked a bit too complicated and far too rich in terms of features. And not only that, but everything suggested that it was aimed at the professional.
I plowed ahead and within a matter of an hour or so, became convinced that I could keep my site up to date and do anything I needed to do with Dreamweaver. And if I can do it, anyone who maintains a Web site can do it, too.
Perhaps too many of us who maintain a site, whether for business or personal reasons, stay away from some of the leading-edge Web design programs. We think they are only for the pros — yet they work for amateurs equally well.
In fact, a tool such as Dreamweaver is typical of many of the sophisticated yet easy-to-use Web editing programs that you can find out there. They make it a piece of cake to get more involved with your site. Indeed, if you know how to use a word processor, you’ll be able to quickly pick up on the basic concepts of editing your Web site using Dreamweaver or any other product.
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