If you read our first blog post here, then you would already know about how our website design services started.
I was working for an internet provider help desk in the early 1990’s, and was asked to build a website for Coldwell Banker, a realtor in Topeka. In this time, the Internet was very young, and there weren’t any books or classes to take that would show you how to build a website. So, I figured it out.
I started coding by hand, understanding how to start and close HTML tags, how to resize and format fonts and text. This type of coding was similar to formatting printouts at a previous job, so I learning how to make fonts bold or underlined came pretty naturally to me.
I found a tag editor called Hot Dog, and that helped coding. Moved on to Netscape Composer, then to Microsoft Front Page, and finally settling on Macromedia DreamWeaver (soon to be purchased by Adobe).
Eventually customers wanted to make their own edits, and you couldn’t blame them. At this time, I was only working the business part-time in the evenings and weekends and many times, couldn’t respond the same day.
I really needed to find (or build) a content management system so the clients can go in and make their own updates without having to call me. Some clients were willing to buy Front Page, or DreamWeaver, make the edits and FTP the changed HTML files to the server. I actually built my first CMS in PHP, and that allowed a client to make their own edits.
Understanding that I couldn’t build a CMS that would manage (or build) a website, that’s easy enough for the non techie end user. I found Joomla!. It was excellent at editing the page content, but wasn’t really good at uploading images, PDF’s or Word Documents. I still had to show my clients how to upload using an FTP program like File Zilla. Joomla! just wasn’t ready for primetime, but I used it several years anyway, but was always looking for a better solution.
I think it came in an online ad, check out WordPress. So I did, it was a really easy installation, and uploading files for content was super easy, so I began switching all my clients to WordPress and I haven’t looked back.
WordPress is a very mature content management system, and has a lot of support behind the product. WordPress is also expandable with plugins created by thousands of programmers worldwide to make WordPress better.
Now I use the Divi template builder, it runs on the WordPress framework and makes editing your website super easy. Divi is a premium template builder for WordPress and can build just about any website design. And everything is mobile friendly.
As a matter of fact, some of this blog was drafted on my phone.
