juleswords.co.uk

My recent move prompted me to finally get round to setting up my own website www.juleswords.co.uk - it seemed a good idea to pass on the website address to everyone along with my new contact details. I’ve been thinking about it for a couple of years and have been along to a couple of courses at the local college. The courses initially encouraged me when I saw how easy it is to get started on creating a website, then completely put me off again when I realised just how hard it is to get it right! I kept dabbling then giving up in exasperation, but having a deadline did the trick in focusing my efforts.

The thought of having my own website originally stemmed from the mess that my CV was getting into. As a freelancer, you end up working on a whole range of projects, in my case, spread across several different areas of work. It’s what I love about working freelance, but it plays havoc with your CV. Making new contacts and keeping existing ones up-to-date is an important part of keeping the work coming in, so being able to pass on a simple web address for potential editors and other contacts to browse at their leisure seemed like a good idea.

After looking at lots of websites, I decided that keeping it simple was the way to go, especially for my first attempt. I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with computers - I love the idea of what they can do, but hate actually trying to put it into practice - so the process of putting the website together involved a lot of frustration and lots of swearing at my pc! As I got towards the end, I was at last feeling like I was getting to grips with the whole process and started to see how I should have gone about achieving what I wanted. By that time though I just wanted to get something up and running, and wasn’t about to go back and make fundamental changes so late in the day. I finally got something together just in time to send off when I’d moved into my new place at the start of the year. I’m far from completely satisfied with the final result (and have already discovered it doesn’t work properly on Macs - d’oh!) so there will no doubt be a second version to come. I think I need a break from it first though to let the pc rage subside and to come back to it with a new eye and fresh inspiration … perhaps in the spring.