Website Design: Sometimes you shouldn’t listen to your friends

When it comes to biking, and without blowing my own trumpet, it is safe to say that with all the miles under my belt, I am what you call an old geezer. Age has a way with our body and all I can say is that thank the stars for keeping me active and on the saddle. I may walk like a crab, from time to time, but I can still kick them pedals… is all I will add on this, my personal relationship with my bicycle.

You might wonder why there’s an image of a website design on my site but there is a good reason, and I talk about it.

Some say that serious cyclists record everything they do on when they go out on a ride.  The miles they cycled, the food they ate…  If this is true, then I must be a very serious cyclist because throughout my life, that’s exactly what I have done.

I am from the generation of the written diaries, personal logs carefully hand written in ink of varying, and over time, unfortunately, fading colors. I always knew I needed a blog…

You need a blog one of my kids told me a few years ago… Duh I told him. I know that.

A few years past until a few weeks ago, I finally bit the bullet and went for it. I bought my self a domain which I thought was all needed to get my blog started… Which as it turned out, wasn’t. I also needed to host the darned thing AND I had to make sure this blog would reflect my own personality. And that’s when all my trouble started.

I am at an age where spending money on a hobby is something I can afford and I was quite prepared to hire myself a web designer so that he or she would put me on my merry way.

That didn’t go well with my peeps I must say:

Designing my site.

“You don’t need to pay someone to design your website, you can do it yourself” I was told in no uncertain terms.  Even my grand daughter, that 6 year old little beauty jumped right into the argument:

“If you want, I’ll help you design it” she said all proud and stand high at 3 feet and love.

“Wed design is so easy, and if you can use a word processor, you can design a website” was the expert opinion of my son. And there were a few others, in the same vain… “Get yourself a free web design. You won’t have to pay a penny and your site will look as if it had been designed by an expert!”

And so I listened to my friends, scooted over to that company which always advertises on tv about free website design, signed up for a free account and set upon the task of putting my dreams into words for the whole world to read.

And in the beginning it was awesome. I wrote several articles, which I posted, alongside photos of yours truly and I had a site I was very proud of myself.

And then I realized that site I had just designed for free wasn’t really mine at all… That nice company owned it.

And I discovered the hidden costs of … free…

A month later, feeling as if I was being held hostage by the “very nice people of …” (my lawyer says I should refrain from giving out their name), I was out of there.

In the process, I lost all my articles, all my images, everything that I had so painstakingly put together.  I lost my beautiful website.

I was back to square one. And this time, I wasn’t going to listen to my friends.

This time I was going to call a professional, get some quotes, talk to a few people, you know what we do everything else we want to buy in life and this is how I me Jacques, web designer extraordinaire.  I call him that, because in no time at all, and for very little money, he set me up with this site.

And I couldn’t be happier.

And the best thing of it is that the site is mine.  To do with what I please.

I promised I would give him a shout out if ever I was to share my website experience with anyone, and thus here is.  A Coral Springs Website Design Agency run by Jacques who can do it all.  I am trying to get him to bike with me, but that’s another thing all together.