Website Confusion

I have been in the throes of making a website for the last year.

It's been an interesting experience. Hmmm... I think I'm using that word as a euphemism's for frustrating. I am a newbie when it comes to this stuff.

I don't have a lot of cash to throw at the problem and don't have any really techie friends so it's just me and the good ol' Google trying to get enough information to put together a decent website.

I thought about getting someone to design my website for me but the friends I have who have done that found that they had a hard time getting updates when the needed to or other problems with designers.

I figured out about getting the domain name and the web hosting. I got a domain name and hosting through godaddy.com.

I choose godaddy because it was the easiest for me to deal with living overseas. I'm sure that somewhere out there a better service is waiting, but I don't want to look forever. The main thing was that it didn't look like a flaky fly-by-night. The last thing I wanted was to chase some company from several time zones away. I looked into local servers in Japan, but got frustrated with the language level required. A friend of a friend is a computer guy and he recommended it so I decided to give godaddy a go.

I got the website tonight program because I didn't have any site builders. It's okay. I am really disappointed with their albums. I asked about editing the backgrounds and got help with that, but the choices are limited and they are all ugly. The Online Photofiler is interesting. There are certainly a lot of templates to choose from, but to be honest, I really hate the layout. It doesn't look professional. It's great for showing family and friends, but I would rather use Flickr than Online Photo Filer. Flickr is much more interesting and easier to embed in blogs.

Finally I figured out how to make a web-gallery from Photoshop Elements. I tried different ways to upload it, only to find out that Website Tonight doesn't allow FTP uploads. Fine. No problem. But after reading and reading and reading the user guides in godaddy.com I never really found that information baldly stated. In fact, I found the help guides to be rather labyrinthine.

I've finally upgraded my computer to an iMac. Another huge learning curve coming up.

I guess rather than spiralling through godaddy's help guide I might as well just mail my questions straight off.

Ah...

Nothing like lots of unclearly defined challenges.