The internet: Bringer of infinite knowledge, re-joiner of friends long forgotten, saviour of the procrastinator. The world wide web is an incredible tool and its influence touches each of us on a daily basis. It has inspired collaboration and helped taken a stance against corruption and for that it truly has been a wonderful game-changer.
But there’s a dark, desperate and lonely, forgotten side of the web that, for all its shininess, we try in our rose-tinted love of picking up our phones and finding out anything we could ever need to know in an instant, to forget about. I speak not of those seedy x-rated websites nor the underground community of hackers and thieves. Not of the hidden terrorist networks nor the theft of private information. For there is a more desperate place amongst both these dark and golden web pages, a place of such despair we can hardly bare to speak of it: the hidden world of the website designer.
For a while now we’ve been wanting to make some changes to Bride Vs Groom as well as to our other various websites and this is a task that I had initially rather looked forward to. Having been a blogger and in charge of my own business for a while now website design is something I feel I’ve learnt quite a bit about and, with our resident expert website builder rather busy on other projects at the moment I relished the chance to have a go myself and see what I could come up with.
For those who have built websites themselves you will, I’m sure, appreciate the simple joy of finally starting on your site, dropping in your logo, building a quick menu and getting some basic place-holder content onto the site within a short space of time. With CMS structures like WordPress or Blogger boasting the ability to create entire websites without an ounce of HTML programming knowledge it really should be a breeze to create a great looking and unique website without worrying about whether you’ve put that bracket in the right place or checking e-bay for an enigma machine to try and crack what the heck any of this seemingly random code actually means.
And it is. Right up until the point that it isn’t…
.jpg)
WordPress seems particularly keen on luring you into a false sense of security. Within a few hours you can often have several pages looking almost exactly the way you want them. Except for one minor detail – one minor detail that stops the whole thing from working. One minor detail that inexplicably you will not be able to find a solution for in the entire infinite knowledge of the world wide web. Amongst the literally millions of websites that have been created and the huge communities of website designers, the infinite FAQ sections of theme support and the hundreds of strangely named people with odd quotes underneath who seemingly exist solely to help you with their own unique brand of mockery and condemnation on forums, somehow no-one will quite know the answer to your problem. After effectively smugly building your entire website in under 4hours you will then spend the next 4 months searching for the answer to your problem until, on the incredible, euphoric day that finally (after deciding it was simpler to just learn all of HTML coding from scratch) you work out that it was all caused by a conflict with that plugin that inexplicably quotes Louis Armstrong, you notice that someone has released a new theme that would probably work better in practically every way.
Until it doesn’t.
And so the cycle continues. One day, dear readers, you shall have a new look Bride Vs Groom, and on that day I shall almost certainly be declared master of the matrix and told that our world isn’t real and tasked with ripping it all down. Until then, the dark, despairing world of the would-be web designer shall remain my realm.
So whilst idly surfing the web at a speed of 10 sites per minute, spare a thought for the poor buggers that designed them. For to master the art of the <H3> tag one must surely sacrifice a part of your soul.
