This year started in a bit of a calamity for my family, as it did for many. On top of dealing with all the absurdity of COVID, there were plenty of issues going on the home front that needed my attention. After my week-long ER visit and healing time at the end of last year, I wanted to refresh the look of my site. My previous site was operational but not very artistic, and I wanted to get back to my roots and add that look and feel back my website. As some of my posts have mentioned, I follow Bootstrap’s releases and upgrades regularly. I started out using Bootstrap in version 3 and upgraded to version 4 after it came out and wanted to do the same for version 5.

When I started, Bootstrap 5 was in beta. My original goal was to launch my new website about the same time that the final release came out, but you know the saying about life throwing your curve balls.

It dont always be like that, but sometimes it do

Earlier this year, I needed to travel and stay with my mom while she was going through and healing from cancer treatments. Immediately after that, I needed to be back home while my wife underwent a major surgery that took a good while to heal. She couldn’t do any normal tasks until she was better. Keeping up with everything took all my focus and energy and I just lost focus and drive for anything else. At the end of everything, my mom’s surgery went great, and so did my wife’s surgery, so I feel very lucky that it was only time that was needed to get them back to regular life.

Once everyone was on the mend and healing to the point of getting back to normal, it still took a while for me to really get back in the groove to finish up my website. I went through an unwind for a couple months myself to just get my head in the game, but eventually started back up. Fortunately, I made enough notes and progress that getting back didn’t take much time. I will note though, the final version did alter from the beta version some, and it took about a week to correct; once I did that, it was back to converting my old website to the new one. Since I was updating all the pages anyways, I went back through and did some SEO for each page and corrected some verbiage. I had let some mistakes go by and that is always embarrassing.

The first challenge for me was my blog posts; it was a little tedious rewriting everything to match the new SEO approach and correcting simple mistakes. I write my material in MS Word, but I could still use a proofreader. I learned how valuable those are while I was at Parallax when there was a proofreader and editor; between the two, my articles and documentation was always great. I might hire a proofreader service, but I have a couple more ideas to use before I just throw money at the issue.

I have added a shop for purchasing items and commissionable options since some of my work has been received with much appraise. I’m defaulted to using email or phone to communicate instead of a complicated shopping cart because I believe with these types of pieces require communication to get everything perfect. Other than those additions and operations with SEO, the content is virtually the same. I’m going to keep up with featured projects, articles and YouTube channels, my archives, and projects.

I am satisfied with how it turned out, and no doubt will do some tweaking in the next couple months, but all in all, I shouldn’t have to revisit a site redo for at least 3-5 years. Now I can focus on new harder and more detailed projects, getting the word out to see if I can dig up interest in some of my pieces, and just working at growing my maker skills.