Webmaster

Making soap led me to needing to sell it. What better way than a website?

It sounded so easy when I started, but there was a pretty steep learning curve in getting my skills to the point where I could manage a website. My first website, for Chandler’s Soaps was actually built by the main man in my life, Jere. He hand-coded it (no Dreamweaver or FrontPage for him!). Of course, I had to “snooper-vise” and in doing so I learned a lot.

As time went on and I had to update products and information, I learned how to do it myself. First the simple things, then more complex. Then my logic skills and desire to do things only once took over… and I started turning my experience with Microsoft Access into the ability to make dynamic webpages utilizing information kept in a database using php. And so a web-geek was hatched.

Since that time, I’ve studied and practiced and, with a great deal of thanks to L. Ron Hubbard’s Study Technology have become a pretty proficient computer nerd. (It’s a nice offset to ranch work.)

Webmastering Skills

My repertoire of skills has grown over the years, most of it learned when needed in order to accomplish a specific job. I do a lot of work for my guy, Jere, and his business Words In a Row. Most of the interactive website work that customers request gets passed to me and I do the work.

• HTML and CSS
  HTML (“hyper text markup language”)is the language used to make web pages. I code everything “by hand” (not using a WISYWIG tool). It’s much like the old-school word processing when making something bold meant putting a “bold” marker at the start and end. I guess I am telling my age by mentioning I did word processing when it was a “new thing” – just a step up from an electric typewriter!

  CSS (“cascading style sheets”) is what’s used on a web site to keep the styles all the same so from page to page.

• PHP
  PHP is a programming language that makes interactive websites and sites that can pull information from a database and feed it into a webpage. Have to say that this is my favorite language to use (although it ties in closely with HTML and CSS in order to display the information on the page).
• JavaScript I'm currently learning javascript and using the jquery libraries to create a new kind of interactive website - one that changes when you click on different things. Unlike php, which requires a page to load to get it to change, javascript allows the page to change more quickly based on what the user is doing. Pop-up windows, things that move and shift when you click or move the mouse - that sort of thing.
• X-Cart
  X-Cart is a commercial shopping cart program that is very flexible and customizable. It can do just about anything you want it to. It’s based in php and javascript, and over the years I’ve worked with a number of different versions of the program. Now one of the services I provide is customising X-Carts for people.