Monday 30 April 2012

Coming soon...

Much excitement in the EH camp at the moment as I have been working on a new website. My old site was great when I first had it, but was set up for me by someone else and as a result I have had no way of updating it as time went on, meaning that now - 6 years since it first went online - it's looking very dated. When a friend mentioned a great site she was using to build a new site for her business (Thanks Jan!) I decided to give it a go - how hard could it be?

The site concerned was www.weebly.com - it describes itself as offering "drag & drop" website building, and you know, it really is that simple. You decide what you want on each page, click on the relevant element on the toolbar, and drag it into place on the page. Seemples - as that Meerkat would say! Options for page layouts include differing numbers of columns, photo galleries and even slideshows, plus lots of different options for photos and text. You can incorporate a blog using Weebly's own software, or do as I have done and link a page straight to an external site meaning that once I hit the button to launch the site officially you will be able to click straight through to this blog from within it, seamlessly. The best thing about Weebly has to be the functionality - things work as you would expect them to, photo galleries for example - when you click in a picture in one of my galleries you will get an enlargement of the shot, followed by the option to click through the rest of the photos in the gallery. I have also built in navigations which means you can get from gallery to gallery without having to go back to the top every time, and links to external sites will open new pages. Best of all, it's an entirely free service, which fits wonderfully with my frugal credentials! All it has cost me is a small sum to buy my new Domain name - although in time I hope to get the old one back, this is going to take a while yet I think.

This is the first time I have even attempted anything like this - and I can honestly say I went in with a fairly cynical view on Weebly's claim of how simple it was - they were right though - the whole process has been straightforward and easy - the hardest thing has been deciding which photos should go in the galleries! I'm extremely proud of the result - which is now having the finishing touches put on to it - watch this space, and follow @EssexHebridean on Twitter for news of the launch date - I'd love to know what you think once it's up and running shortly!

Robyn


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