Category: Site Development

I did not think about site development when I first, er, developed this site.

Site Development: Picture It: Sicily, 1912. No, Wait…

Maybe not that. And my apologies for the obscure and utterly unhip Golden Girls reference.

But still, let’s head on back to 2010, when I was first getting onto WordPress. And, truth be told, you can go back even further. Because, heh, yeah, I had a Geocities account back in the day. The day was, I am pretty sure, 1998 and beyond.

So, today, in 2023, that means that I have been keeping some form of a website for a good quarter of a century.

Sounds pretty impressive, when you think of it that way, eh?

Preparation? Plans? What Are Those?

With absolutely no idea of what I wanted to write about, I threw some photos online so they would be easier to retrieve. In that sense, the old account was rather helpful.

But eventually I started to think about blogging. I was on Blogger for a while there, too. I finally put money down with GoDaddy in, I am guessing, 2008? Maybe?

I first tried my hand at design but I honestly did not know what I was doing. At all. I learned some html and had enough knowledge to be able to do things like bold text. And… that was it.

I also had no idea about site structure.

How Does Site Development Fix All That?

I think it goes hand in hand with planning in general. Plan the work, and work the plan, as it were.

I’ve found it best to think of it a bit like an old-school traditional outline. You know, the kind that look like:

etc.

Your Roman numerals are your categories, really. And they are also your menu pages. The capital letters are content hubs. Now, WordPress does not do a great job with this unless you feel like paying for it, which I do not. But the idea behind a hub is that other posts and pages can kind of hang off it.

My universe explorations pages are hubs.

For the Arabic numerals, it’s the spokes of those hubs. For example, for the Obolonk hub page, some of the spokes are reviews of the books in it. Other spokes are character reviews.

The lower case letters aren’t much but I like to use them as connective tissue between hubs. A hub about covers should connect to a hub on editing. My hub on all the career stuff I do should connect to hubs on social media, Quinnipiac, and posts about any jobs I’ve held.

And so it goes!