So I had the bright idea today that I wanted a nice fancy title page/front page to my blog so that it was more of a balance between a website and a blog. I have been a bit disappointed so far that the site, which I made to direct people to my work, primarily leads people to my blog. I wanted to create a home page where people could navigate to different areas. I do have the other areas on my pages but they are a small feature.
So I started to look into how to do that and little by little I became more in over my head. At first I thought “I’ll just create a new page with a title” But that didn’t work at all.
Then, Once I realised how I wanted to create the page, I realised that the header I had would be in the way. All I wanted was a plain background with my name and a few links.
I started to read some forums. I dabble in them from time to time but still have not really found my go to places for answers yet. I became completely confused by the things that people were talking about. It all seemed to come down to CODE…
I had played with html text within a post but never anywhere else. So when people started suggesting ways to edit various codes, I couldn’t help but wonder WHERE ON EARTH DO YOU DO THAT!
Apparently, its pretty straight forward. I just need to buy a version of my wordpress theme that allows me to customise it. Why no one mentioned that anywhere, i don’t know. SO I AM.
So I looked into the customising page and it mentioned HTML and CSS. It seems I had to edit things from scratch or something.
So next step.
Learning how to write code.
I found the HTML dog was my bible to teaching me stuff. It goes through, in baby steps, how to do everything and what it all means. Where it led me astray was in informing me of what program I should use to write html in.
I have a mac. It seemed the only writing software that came installed was textedit. Unfortunately, this program didn’t allow me do what I needed. A basic requirement it seems is to write in a program using ‘plain text’ and then having it save as a ‘.html.’ For some reason these two functions could never work simultaneously, I could write in plain text but not save as a .html, or I could write in rich text and save as a .html and it wouldn’t work. Epic fail text edit.
So I surfed forums again. I tried Plain Text editor, but it was a pain as well. Finally I found Text wrangler.
This program was somewhat cheating, where it did a little bit of the hard work for me. But to be honest, I don’t need to be a mastermind at this, I just need it to work without taking up too much of my time.
Anyway, so I followed the steps of HTML dog in Text wrangler and I was looking at my very own web page. It was a really boring one but surprisingly very exciting and rewarding to see that i had figured it out and it worked.
It only took me a few hours.
The funny thing is, i’m not even 100% sure I even needed to learn all this but, I guess it can’t hurt. I still haven’t gotten anywhere near a title page, so keep your eyes peeled. When it pops up, you’ll know what it took.
Gotta go, have to learn how to insert a heading into a post.
Ehran Edwards 