My Journey to a Website

A new website is like a new baby. Not as strenuous on the body but definitely a process, a journey. I wanted to share a few milestones in this journey with you.

Inception
A website might not seem necessary when you have a blog. After all you can show your projects and tutorials on the blog, share your DT work, have giveaways and contests. It is your virtual online home that you can edit, design and build any way you can. Well...it's all true, but I felt I needed more. I needed a bigger home if you will...
I wanted a hub for all my creative adventures and a blog was not enough anymore. A website was the logical leap forward and it seemed rather easy or is it?

Doubts
My new hub was supposed to host a few new endeavours which I knew I wanted to start but for some reason dragged my feet. The main thing I wanted to start were online classes. I knew people liked my Youtube tutorials and told me I was doing a good job. I also had experience in teaching classes both in Hebrew and English, but somehow online classes seemed much more complicated. I had two major dilemmas what to teach and where to teach.

Another doubt was how to find someone to create that website for me. A person that would accept my perfectionism and will be patient with me. Someone who will be willing to change things...a lot! Oh...and someone who knows how to build a google friendly website with a back office system I could understand. Just thinking about all this scared me...

A little Faith
One day I simply boiled it down to one question...Do you want to grow or stay where you are? Once I knew the answer I decided to break down this ginormous task to small steps. I opened my excel and created a table. Each task was broken down to small steps and were arranged in the order they needed to be done. I knew I would need to work on all my tasks simultaneously. But my biggest weapon was believing in myself. Once I felt i could do it, I knew nothing will stop me. I also decided not to stress about the time...it will take as long as it takes!

Multitasking
I had main tasks: Building the website, finding where to host my classes, write the classes, prepare content for the website and plan a launch (which came much later).
Fortunately I found an amazing lady who is not only a website designer but an artist herself, so I was confident she was no stranger to perfectionism... We changed the website a lot...but she never once told me she couldn't do something. Thank you Michal!
Finding where to host my classes needed a little research. I finally decided how I wanted my classes to look and what they would offer which led me to the solution of Google sites. Now I had to figure out how to build a classroom, a forum and to enroll the students to the different classes. Again here I was fortunate to find an amazing lady who took me through all of it. Thanks Jeri Parks.
Creating online classes was a lot of work! Once I decided what to teach I had to write the content, create PDF files, film and edit videos, take photos, build a classroom, upload everything... This took a long time because I had to do that while doing all my DT work, Designing for companies and making a living...

The Final Step
When most of the content was ready and the website was on the air I started planning the launch. I wrote 30 blog posts!! one for each day of the launch month as well as a few anchor articles. I wrote all the pages of the website like the about, a page for the online classes and for each class separately. I designed all the blinkies and buttons as well took all the photos for the classes and posts.
Then I planned a month long schedule on my blog, facebook and other social sites. Thank god for programs which allow you to schedule posts in advance!

Time was passing quickly...
April 1st came quickly, but I was ready!
The website was born!
I want to thank you all for your support and love. You gave me a lot of strength with all the encouraging words, compliments and virtual hugs. I know I couldn't have done all this without all of you having my back out there!

So...Have fun creating!