The technical bottle-necks

Just when all the other issues have started to sort themselves out - content plan, site structure, audience, etc - we have a new hurdle for the technically challenged. Exactly how do we go about doing this? Where do we start? WordPress, some other host, self-host, get a domain, buy web space? We learnt HTML, CSS, Dreamweaver, WordPress Codex and all that jazz. I will admit it does seem a bit much. I wish we had a step-by-step process through all this. Maybe a site that will cater to this?! “Building a website for dummies: A step by step guide to creating, hosting and maintaining your own web site.”

Then some one said that the University gives us some web space. But not much. We toyed with that idea. But we just don’t think we can deal with all the technical stuff - the HTML code, the CSS and pay money for it!

We looked into WordPress and have decided not to get too carried away in technical gizz-mo. So we have decided not to self-host, use complex HTML, CSS, etc. We’d rather focus on the content and on delivering it in the most optimal way to suit the needs of our potential audience.

Of course, after getting into WordPress we discovered that if we opt for the free service, we are deprived of many features. There are no widgets and absolutely no way of making any changes to the template. So many features like adding a calendar for the events tracker, google search algorithm, etc are simply not available.

Clearly this is evidence of just how closely knit technical skill and ability is with content, the living proof of the merger of form and content. Hence the potential of the site is greatly influenced by what we can do in terms of the technology we have at our disposal.

But we are not disheartened. This has helped us rule out what we can’t do because of what we can’t have. It has helped us focus better on what the site should be about and what it should primarily do and for whom. This seeming impediment has opened up doors to experiment within the realms of content and making the site rely heavily on content, which is what the purpose of this whole endeavour is to begin with - web writing for web audiences and the purpose of the WWW. What we are now going to do is just pick a template that best suits us and the nature of the site, keeping in mind the one which offers also the most in terms of add-ons, technical features and pluggins, etc.