I made my first website in the 1990’s, it was absolutely terrible as I really had nothing to say, yes that may still be the case but I ask you to be kind!
I was living in Korea town in Los Angeles, great noodle shops $8 dollar bowl with all you can eat Kimchi. Life in some ways was good. I worked in security for fifteen years until 2020 and pandemic.
I did enjoy my job and I do miss the people I worked with, I intended the website business to be something I could do when I retired as it would be a working from home thing.
2020 brought many changes, personally they brought frozen shoulder, loss of home of fifteen years, early retirement from security job, move to Ireland from Los Angeles.
I hear you say that’s not bad, and moving to Ireland has been great. But with the lockdown and having to leave our home in Los Angeles it took well over a year to figure out we were suffering a withdrawal of some kind.
Our life here in Ireland is better and there is no denying that. But that’s not what I am mean when I say withdrawal. 99% of my family are from this town I am now living in. If I throw a stone in the centre of town I will likely as not hit a family member.
But we have friends in Los Angeles that we have known for twenty or Thirty years who if I met I can give them a big hug and catch up.
I don’t think we realised for a long time we missed that.
It was better for both of us once we realised what the problem was. We are better now and looking forward to visiting California in November.
So what I do now is make websites, I am self taught and my skill set is improving all the time. The funny thing I have discovered is as a freelancer I have to do everything involved in the design aspects of the website. It’s not just the case of putting stuff on a page, there is the Brand, logo and having to manipulate images. It’s moved me in the design direction which is interesting.
The other aspect of the learning website design is that allot of people pay allot of money for websites and they were robbed. On the other hand there are instances where a business decides to try and save money on a website, maybe they decide to manage it themselves and not pay a person to manage it for them. If it’s a business that takes money through the website as a store or subscriptions beware on trying to save as that can come back to bite.
Every week people try to hack into my websites, I have security in place and multiple backups. My wife has learned over the years the term backup, she didn’t do that much before she met me.
I have two solid state drives and cloud backups. Some stuff is too important to be lost. I recently updated my wife’s website as she has her second book of poetry coming out in August. I also have another website coming soon for a client in Town. It’s a groomers and I hope maybe next week to pop it up.
Lot’s of businesses here use Facebook as a online presence. I understand this as it’s free, but the reason it’s free isn’t because Facebook is benevolent, they make money advertising on your business page. Maybe they show the other business in town that do the same thing as you. If you have a brick and mortar store would you let a stranger design your shop window. Search engines will in the end pick up your facebook page but they won’t unless you are searching for the name. If you sell burgers and search for burgers in an area it won’t bring up your facebook page, but it will bring up a website. A website is the store front the whole world can see (except china and Russia, North Korea and a few Arab speaking countries), but it still leaves quite allot.
When it comes to business and anything where money is involved I suppose it comes down to trust. And that’s a hard one to create unless you can give it time and have some people who can speak up for you.
Over a year ago I was talking to an Author who wanted to update his website, there were many pages and I think he thought I was going to charge him a fortune to retype the pages again. It was after we parted ways I figured that was his issue, Of course now I could tell him there is such a thing as copy and paste. But it just goes to show you have to trust the person you’re dealing with isn’t going to screw you over or at least be honest with you.
The world is a crazy place at the moment, the war in Ukraine, and the rise of Fascism in the United States. It makes me worried for the future, I hope my friends in the United States are safe and getting ready to vote
I thought I would finish with pet pictures!
