Dot Com
“Mom this is your domain name and your password, want to write it down? No? Okay Mom pay attention, to build a website you must understand what runs behind the scenes, how to transfer with a FTP and blah-blah-blah-blah….”
HELP! My eyes are starting to cross. I’m tired. If I pretend to
pass out will he stop talking? Honestly, who would forget that goofy
password and frankly, I don’t give a flip about how a website works or
what is running in the background. Calgon take me away!
Let me start from the beginning. As a gift, my middle son Cory
designed a website for me. It’s been an ongoing creative process over
the past month. This is how it worked; Cory would create several
different web-page options with a mix of fonts, colors, and graphics,
then I’d pick my favorite page for my new website.
However, I discovered that after several days I was not happy with
some of my selections. I wanted to try a lighter color or a larger
font. So I asked Cory to tweak things a little bit. Maybe change my
photo.
Lately Cory has not been returning my calls. I think he’s getting
cranky with me. I know I keep changing my mind about the website design
but really, how hard can it be to modify a website? (Well, he best get
over his mad because I’m going to visit him in New York soon. The
ticket is non-refundable.)
It is now May and I’m flying to New York spending one-on-one time
with Cory. This year we go to a fashion show. We walk in Central Park
and zoom up ‘70’ floors to the top of the Rockefeller Center. What a
view! Then we go Uptown, Downtown, Midtown, and to the Meat Packing
district. We even went to a live taping of the David Letterman show!
After several days of fun, I’m totally exhausted.
It’s my last night and we’re on our way back to Cory’s apartment. I
yearn for a hot shower and my snuggly jammies. Honestly, I have to get
to bed at a decent hour because my flight is early in the morning!
However, Cory had a different itinerary. After I dump packages on the bed and pull off several layers of warm clothing, this darling son of mine pulls out a gray metal folding chair motioning me to set. I’m placed in front of the computer! (Funeral music begins to play in my head.) “Mom we are going to have a Website-101 Lesson.” (Hey, I’m blindsided. Feel free to swear, I did.)
After a couple hours of painful sitting, I figured out the nuts and bolts of web designing. First, you purchase a domain name, which can be a dot-org, dot-com, or dot-net. For under ten dollars, I bought pvbos.com at the internet site GoDaddy. You’ll now need someone to host your website. I pick GoDaddy again because they will run pvbos.com on their server for under sixty dollars a year. Dreamweaver is the program Cory has on his computer that creates or edits each section of a web page. Once you have the new page designed, you’ll transfer that file from your computer onto your live website via a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server like FileZilla.
Cory had me edit and transfer several files, change source codes, delete things and then correct them. He showed me tricks of the trade and short cuts. Hey, look at me I’m a Super-Star! By the time, I crawled into bed I’m dreaming about articles.html, stories.html, bio.html.
Now that I’m back home and rested, I mentally review each step I have to complete in order to deposit a new story on my website. I feel confident. I pull up Dreamweaver, GoDaddy, and FileZilla.
Houston we have a problem. Does anyone remember that goofy password?
