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Who knew when I started our website in 2002 that we'd have so many visitors. Yesterday was the anniversary of its launch (and my Dad's birthday also...Happy Birthday!). The site today looks quite a bit different from the version in '02. That one had brown buttons I had made online and had a green faux leather textured background. It had good pictures, that I'll say for it. But terrible design. This was the first index page photo.

Holly and three of her Am/Can offspring..."painted" in Photoshop .

As corny as it was, I was proud of it, because I had done it myself. You see, Pete was going to do it for me. Pete is the computer wiz. He has lived and breathed computers since they came into being. He understood how to design a website. To me it was mysterious. So Pete said to me,"write down the words". So I did. He didn't think I'd be done so quickly, so he said, "scan the photos". And I did that. "Organize the headings", and once again I brought him that. But Pete was busy. I waited. And waited. A year, and then another. Finally I saw a course for web design at a local high school and I enrolled. It was short, only four Saturday mornings and I drove across town anxious to begin. I sat at the front of the class, all set to put my words and my photos online and have a website, sort of like this blog...if Google blogger had been around then. Type, insert pictures, done...right? Not quite.

So the instructor introduced himself and then started writing code. HTML what was THAT? That wasn't what I wanted. I wanted the course that showed you where to put your pictures and how to put your words underneath.

After the first class I twiddled my thumbs and had a very bad attitude. The second class was about the same. I told the instructor that this course wasn't quite what I thought it would be...I was a right brained person, and this seemed more like math. He laughed. He suggested I just copy some coding to familiarize myself with the symbols.

He then told us about hexidecimal codes which are a six unit coding for all colors. He instructed us to make a page of a different color, and he showed us the coding for that and the list of some possible colors. So I made a page black.....wow!

That wasn't so hard.

Then we were shown the method for linking pages...and our homework was to make a page with three links. Well, something happened that class and the lightbulb went off and I went home and made 48 pages! By the end of the fourth week, the site was up and running and I had a guest book.

It was great to figure out that HTML wasn't really math at all, just a new language to learn.

It has been a fun exercise and a great learning experience. I am still figuring things out and I would like to take more courses to become more proficient.

I'm glad Pete was busy. I needed the push.