My website was created by a professional company.  However, for economy sake, I took on the role of updates to the site. 

My reasoning was that since I'd used FrontPage to maintain a site for almost a year for my local chapter, that I could handle this.

That was the first assumption where I went seriously wrong. 

First of all, I discovered Microsoft has moved on from FrontPage and is no providing newer versions.  And the version I had could not adequately handle a professionally produced website that had scripts embedded in it.

Second of all, I'm HTML illiterate. 

I'd hoped to use visual editing to do updates.  As I wasn't ready to spend hundreds of dollars to get Microsoft's replacement version of FrontPage I opted to try out an HTML editor that was more reasonable in cost and promised to have a visual editing ability.  So I bought it for $50.00.

That would be the second assumption where I went seriously wrong.

Not only was it difficult to near impossible to do updates in the visual mode, but there were no adequate learning tools to help me use the visual mode.  So when it came time to do updates (who knew I'd need to do it so soon???) I had to learn HTML.

• I learned that a '#' sign in the wrong place can totally crash a page
• I learned that <h5> shoud only be used for titles and that it has to end with </h5>
• I learned that  I can copy codes and rework them to my benefit instead of having to create one each time
• I learned not to copy and paste text from Word to HTML unless I have an oxygen mask nearby for emergency use
• I learned to copy pages and paste them someplace safe before fiddling with it in case I totally messed it up while working on it
• I learned to back up everything

Let me say that I was frightened of HTML before, now I just hate it. 

But I'm learning.

Two weekends ago, it took me almost crashing my site to just put in one link that worked.

Today, two hours later, I learned how to add in images without ruining all the text that comes after it.

Long story short, the site's finally updated, I've got a few more gray hairs than I did before, and I now know more HTML than I ever wanted to learn, and that would be just a speck of sand in a desert of what I probably need to know.


Shereen