In the beginning…

The day after deciding to build a website, I realized I needed software. So I did some research, looked up free software, read a bunch of online reviews, emailed a couple of web-savvy people for advice. In about two hours I realized I had to buy Dreamweaver. I have to confess – I jumped into this project of creating a website with a lot of confidence based on my 20+ years in business (marketing and web development). Although I’ve spent about four hours of my life learning HTML (around a decade ago, when the web was much younger), I felt confident that I would be a quick study. The other thing I had was the strong desire to avoid over-planning. That’s what I’ve done in my professional career, I’ve prepared business plans, business cases, powerpoints, strategic overviews, financial projections, project plans, resource plans, etc. etc. My natural tendency would have been to spend a month dumping ideas into a fifty page word document to see if I had a viable business plan for my website. Instead, here’s what I did in my first week of deciding to build a website:

1. Day One: Smiled a lot. I was really excited.
2. Day Two: Created a Powerpoint mock-up of my homepage (I’m pretty nifty when it comes to PP).
3. Day Three: Brainstormed names, Purchased a few URLs from Network Solutions, Signed up with InMotion for website hosting. Purchased and downloaded Dreamweaver CS5.
4. Day Four: Started teaching myself Dreamweaver, through Adobe’s online tutorials, and through Lynda.com.
5. Day Five: Built my first homepage, with a few columns, some placeholder text, a couple of images, and a few working links. Posted the page to my website. Learned how to password protect the page so no one could see it.
6. Day Six: Broke my homepage because I had no clue what I was doing and put some gibberish into the html code.
7. Day Seven: Rested.