Weaving Dreams

A few years back, my Mum, at the age of about 75, phoned me to tell me: “I want a website.” After my initial shock she explained that that the research she’d been conducting into the Martin family history had got to the point where she wanted to share it with the world, in the hope that someone may offer some new leads to fill in some of the remaining gaps.I looked at some of the easy-to-use template sites but none of them really offered the facilities Mum needed.

So I bought Adobe GoLive and settled down for a couple of weeks’ bedtime reading and playing about with it. I’ve always been a keen fan of good graphic design so was able to get something that looked good reasonably quickly. Learning a lot in a very short time was mind-blowing and I thoroughly enjoyed the results - especially when I was able to show my Martin family website site to Mum, a couple of years before she died (Boxing Day 2007). With my new-found skills I set up a new site for my then sailing club and in January 2008 launched the first of Yamaha’s music education websites, both built using GoLive.

Now, some people, presented with two seemingly equal choices, always seem to choose the one that turns out to be a mistake? Well that’s exactly how I felt when Adobe announced they were scrapping GoLive and were encouraging users to switch to their newly acquired Dreamweaver web design software. Now the learning for GoLive had been very worthwhile, though arduous, so I certainly didn’t relish the idea of going through the process again with Dreamweaver. But I took advantage of Adobe’s cross-grade offer and plunged into Dreamweaver, armed with the Dummies’ guide for the previous version.

After a few initial obstacles, I discovered how to import the old site and convert it to Dreamweaver. It did that reasonably well, though I decided to use it as an opportunity to ‘lemon-fresh’ the whole site, with some major changes to the design, achieved mostly by editing the style sheets. Despite my reservations I managed to get through it all and the new Yamaha education info site is now visible here. I hope you like it!

This entry was posted on 25/05/2009 at 11:36 am and is filed under My Learning, Life, web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.