I Don't Know as Much as I Thunk I Did

I once heard about a young girl from Asia who said learning English as a second language is like trying to drink the entire ocean.

When it comes to setting up my own website, I feel the same way.

I'll be totally honest: The generic template I chose is, well, not too pretty, and the sad thing is, all the templates to choose from are the same! Like they've been regurgitated from the 80s. Ugh.

Hopefully this week I will have a new, fresh look to my website. That's what websites should be: new and fresh, inspiring, eye-catching, visitor-keeping. I'm working on it, and will let you know when it's done (okay, so it will never be "done" -- that's the fun of it). But I'll let you know when it's a little easier on the eyes.

Really -- I feel like emailing my web-hosting service and asking them, "Do you not want your customers to succeed?? What are you thinking, offering templates like this? C'mon, people!" Clicking through those boring templates reminded me of a few very droll days back in the early 90s when a friend of mine and I were sent to an MS-DOS training class at Boeing. Yes, it was as fun as it sounds. The instructor was a smallish man with thick glasses, a dingy, small office (which turned out to be our classroom), and a sign above his desk that read, "Department of Redundancy Department." Not the best learning environment.

Needless to say, I learned n-o-t-h-i-n-g.

Back to trying to drink the ocean. I've been swimming in HTML, CSS (cascading style sheets), NVu (like FrontPage, but free), and on and on and on. I really didn't think it would be as difficult to learn as it has been. It doesn't help having a toddler and three teens distracting me, but I can't blame it on them. I taught myself some HTML back when I was learning eBay in the late 90s (when you had to "learn" eBay -- selling and buying is much easier on there now). So, of course, I thought, "No sweat! I'll have a new page designed in no time!" Ha. I didn't have all the necessary knowledge that I thought I did, and there's a ton more to learn than I ever dreamed.

I could go the easy route and pay someone to design my page, but I'm determined to do this for free, which, when translated, means all by my lonesome.

I am determined to be a good student for my teacher (me). Perhaps one day, when I'm a web-designer extraodinaire, I'll start my own web-hosting site.

But with cool templates.