Website design, coding, and tedium

I made my first website in the bad old days of Geocities.

Do you remember Geocities?

No?

*shakes fist* You kids, get off of my lawn.

Thing is, back in the days of Geocities, Tripod, Angelfire, and the like; before Google; when people still used Alta Vista; you could have just a little static page. It didn’t have to be fancy. In fact, text was preferred because we were also on dial up.

The first business page I ever designed was for my father’s business. It didn’t have a shopping cart. It had a teal background. Pictures of products and an email and phone number. These days, that wouldn’t fly.

These days there are heightened security issues. You have to have an integrated shopping cart of some sort.

And heaven help you if you don’t have something trimmed in and neat to the center of the page because your mobile customers won’t be able to read it. And if you want them to read it in Firefox, then it has to use html5. Keeping track of it all is like learning a fourth language. Or viewing Sandskrit though a dirty window and trying to translate it.

What does all this whining mean?

Well, nothing, really. It’s just that I’ve been devoting half an hour a night (or more) to fixing up the website on my 10 year old business. I don’t want it to get lost in the shuffle as I get more to do with the baby-business.

Baby businesses, like all businesses need a lot of tender care and attention.

Older businesses can sometimes run themselves for a few days. But I have goals and plans for both of them. And that means some fierce scheduling and not actually putting off doing the dull parts of the job.

That means today, I created shopping cart buttons for products on the bakery site. (Have I ever mentioned that site? Http://irongatebakery.com if you’re interested.)

And last week and I fought with the secure socket layers to make sure we’re compliant with the new rules and won’t be open to difficulties from Heartbleed. (I watch the security news like a hawk. I shouldn’t need to. I bake cookies, for stapler’s sake.)

And tomorrow, I’ll be taking pictures and figuring out how to integrate the blog into the site proper. And this weekend I’ve got an overnight 48 hour confab with my bakery business partner. We’re going to lay out the path to getting a brick and mortar store.

Huh… wonder if I should make a schedule for posting onto that blog too.

Anyway, I don’t miss the blinking icons of Geocities. I sort of love the way the site is starting to look.

But I will never, never, love the tedious job of actually setting up each individual product button.

Or, you know, being able to take down my under construction gif.