Saturday, April 26, 2008

Enjoy Parenting Again, Again


It is hard to believe, but it has been about seven years since my friends Amy and Reese designed my Enjoy Parenting Again logo and my website. They did it back when I started up teaching parenting classes again, toward the end of my graduate work at Lewis & Clark in Counseling Psychology. Over the years since Amy and Reese first got me launched Erin did the maintenance on the site for me, attaching new PDFs to the resources page and updating the speaking events page periodically to show what was coming up and where I had completed events. She even created new navigation buttons when I added new pages or links (for this blog for instance). Maybe not so hard for web design folks, but working 50 hour plus at the time, and doing that site maintenance for me after wrapping work in the evenings was challenging and appreciated.

Well Erin recently got a new job, and the software she had used to maintain the site is gone along with her commute to Hillsboro (thankfully) and her old laptop. The inability to keep my site up to date is about the only downside of her new job. So I explored some web design software options to see if I could maintain the site as it is. After making my way through more trials than you can shake a stick at, none of them look like they'll do what I'm looking for properly. The template based ones like iWeb and RapidWeaver just don't have a look that fits with the feel I'm after for the site. The more powerful ones that can create the sort of look I'm after, like Dreamweaver, are more complicated than I'm able to allocate time for to learn the software.

So the next step is meeting with a web designer next week to explore options to make the changes needed to give me control of the maintenance, while at least keeping up the current look, and maybe giving it a refresh.

So keep checking back. In a few weeks, there will definitely be new info on the site—I'm looking forward to being able to post pieces as soon as I've written them—and there just might be a new look if the price seems reasonable. I'm hoping that Chigo over at Dogpaw is going to be able to help me out.