I’m now officially a wannabe web designer! Over the past few weeks I have spent many, many hours creating two websites. One for my Mom’s new tutoring business and redesigning my orchestra’s website. I knew nothing about web design when I started and I’m not sure how much more I know now other than trail and error will always get you to the correct answer.

Before starting these tasks this simple WordPress.com blog has been my only web publishing experience. I found creating “real” websites and learning more about coding very interesting. My Mom and I used WordPress.com to create a website for her tutoring business: Learning Rx Tutoring at learningrxtutoring.com. I think she’s pleased with the result and it will work great for her business.

The harder task was venturing into unknown territory with WordPress.org to create a more detailed site for my orchestra, Community Women’s Orchestra. I’ve always been impressed with WordPress.com but had never used WordPress.org. We wanted to use WordPress to build the website for ease of accessibility. Since one doesn’t really need to know anything about web design or coding or have any special software to edit the content of the website this was a good choice for our organization. We have multiple board members, conductors, and involved members who have input to the site. Before we were relying solely on one or two people to make changes and when they were busy the changes couldn’t be made.

WordPress.org really is a neat service. It’s almost identical to WordPress.com but has way more customizable features. This forced me to learn more about coding and CSS formating but I still don’t know much. my approach to the CSS was change one thing at a time, see if it did what you wanted (not likely) or broke something else (likely), revert the change, and repeat with a new item. I’m pretty proud of how the site turned out given my inexperience and the orchestra seems to like it too.

Both of these endeavors would not have been possible at all without the patient help of my college friend Andrew. Andrew, you’re the best!