My name is Ron Wood. I have been building websites since the year 2000. At that time the internet was still relatively new and not everyone had websites. The first website I owned was designed for me by a young man from Teesside and it cost me a small fortune. He used a lot of fancy flash animations and I remember it was quite slow loading. I decided to have a go at making my own.
The first website I put together was with Microsoft FrontPage (discontinued in 2003). I did a home study course to learn how. FrontPage was ok at the time but I found it rather clunky and there were often glitches that caused things to stop working. I became very frustrated and decided to try something else.
I bought a web design package from Serif. It took me a while to get my head round it but once I knew what I was doing no problem. Like all software companies Serif were constantly seeking to improve their product and every year customers would be offered the latest version which of course you had to buy. They would then withdraw support for earlier versions. You had no choice really but to keep upgrading. Each time there was an upgrade you had to relearn the software and put up with any bugs that might manifest themselves on the initial roll out.
The only solution seemed to be to learn to code. I started buying books on coding and I taught myself HTML, CSS and the basics of PHP and JAVASCRIPT. With this knowledge I was able to build a web page from scratch with no external software. This gives a much cleaner page (I mean the coding that you don’t see but a robot web crawler ie Googlebot does) than the jumble you get with off the shelf web design software. I think this is much better from a search engine perspective.
As I was learning to code I also came across WordPress:
WordPress is a free and open-source content management system written in PHP and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database. Features include a plugin architecture and a template system, referred to within WordPress as Themes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress
I used WordPress primarily for adding blogs to my websites but it can also be used to create a standard site like this one. I love WordPress!
I should also mention Social Media. Now everybody has a Facebook page, a Twitter account and an Instagram account. When I started Facebook and Twitter were new. In the early days of Facebook you could customise the pages to your own design. I spent endless hours creating the most fantastic pages. It was like having your own website within Facebook. They soon decided this was a bad idea and pulled the plug. Facebook now tightly controls what you do on your business pages.
Of course I read all the books on Social media marketing and how to get the best out of Twitter. Social media has now become an industry all of its own. It’s big business.
So that is me. I’m not looking to set the world on fire. I want to work with other small business people to use my skills, knowledge and experience to help them achieve their goals.
Ron Wood
June 2020.