Treading New Territory with Social Media
I’m treading new territory by building my own websites and updating or deleting old ones. The easy thing to do would be to hire a web developer, which I have done in the past. I had two great web developers. Ella Curry of EDC Creations who designed my jjmichael website and Catrina Davis of Amsterdam who built the pathtotruth site.
As a gatejumper, I have to post and make daily changes. I’m used to doing different tasks on sites where I have webpages such as authorsden.com/jjmichael, FileBy.com/author/j_jmichael/1932659 or pathtotruth.wordpress.com. But now I need to be in the driver’s seat of my two main sites (jjmichael.com and pathtotruth.com)and that means learning how they operate.
I found hosting sites such as squarespace.com and mysite.com that offer friendly user tools to build your site. Watching the video on building the site, I thought at the time it looked easy, but I ran into a few glitches when I actually started to work on them. They’re a work in progress.
Chris Brogan saved the day. I read his blog about Thesis Theme for WordPress. Thesis Theme 5.1 is a high-quality template system that allows you to do technical things such as move columns, add sidebars, plugins, with a click.
That’s for me, I thought, because it will give me control over the sites and help me work through those glitches. Without hesitation, I clicked on DIYThemes.com.
Downloading the Thesis 1.5 was easy; uploading it to my WordPress dashboard stumped me. I had never uploaded files to a website.
Several hours later, I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs. It was frustrating, but I learned about FTP (File Transfer Protocol) and publishing documents to the web. Being a gatejumper is not only about doing but also about learning that’s where the wisdom comes in.
During my “aha” moment, I heard the door bell ring. It was the UPS guy delivering the memory chip I had order for the computer. Before returning to my desk to finish dealing with the upload of the Thesis file to my wordpress theme folder, I took a moment to read the simple instructions on the back of the memory chip package. Then I reached into the drawer and pulled out a screwdriver. If there’s no blog up next week and you don’t see any improvements on the websites, you know what happened.
