My Small but Significant Triumphs with Online Tools

This week I've done some heavy aesthetic editing to my website. I got the pictures back from my photographers and was very excited to get them on my site.

I thought that once I got the photos, I'd get a new template for my site and have a cool picture sliding feature on it. Instead, I spent hours on Wednesday wrestling with new templates and sliders. It turns out that to really get what you want from a website, you either have to find the perfect template that is also user-friendly or learn CSS. So, I plan to eventually learn CSS. Until then, I'm going to keep my original template but "jazz it up" as best I can. I'm also going to look into plug-ins and see which ones will work with my template. A lot of this so far has been trial and error.

Anyways, after deciding to stick with my original, very user-friendly template, I began to resize my photos because the original photos are 13+MB and WordPress will only allow up to 4MB photos. I found a great online tool for resizing pictures. It's called PicResize and it resizes single photos or large batches of photos quickly.

After that was completed, I spent some time in Photoshop creating a good background for my site. This was again a lot of trial and error. I had to place the photos on a blank layer and then spread them the perfect length apart to get them to look the way they do on my site.

This is what my website's background looks like in Photoshop

Thankfully, it turned out great:

I'm really pleased with the way my site looks now. I wrote two blog posts this week and I think I'm going to make a goal to write a post 1-2 times per week. Hopefully I'll be able to get some guest blogging going once a month and eventually some question and answer blogs. Right now I'm trying to figure out how to get my site to post excerpts of the blogs with a "Continue Reading" option on the front page rather than the entire blogs automatically. Some templates come with that feature automatically, but as far as I can tell, mine doesn't.

There is still more work I'd like to do on the blog, such as adding pictures to my Pages (Reasons, Advice, etc.) editing on those pages, creating other pages such as "Submit Your Story," and a more user-friendly contact page. I'd also like to create a Facebook page and get readership that way. I've already created a Twitter account (@EarlyHomecoming) and am learning now the best way to tweet and get more readership. All of this will come with time. Right now, I'm just excited that it's up and going. I've received lots of support from friends and family for my project, and from others that I don't even know. I hope that anyone who needs it will soon be able to easily find it.