my internet presence

Those of you who click over here from my website may have noticed that it hasn’t been updated since Christmastime. There’s a reason for this (it’s not a very good one, but there is a reason): I don’t know how to use Dreamweaver. I want to know — it seems like the web deisgn program all the cool kids are using — but I can’t wrap my head around it. My website was desinged on [whispering] FrontPage. And since moving away from Florida, I’ve lost access to my PC and my FrontPage and my little red-haired-girl web set.

The practical upshot of all of this is that I now have a webpage that tells everyone everything about my unpublished romance novels and precisely zip about my soon-to-be-published mainstream women’s fiction. And there’s not a dang thing I can do about it, unless I want to scrap all pretenses of decent web design and do a simple html page. (The horror!)

The way I see it, I have two options:
1)Try to learn Dreamweaver. Again (this will be attempt #4, by the way).
2)Hire a web designer.

The problem with number 1 is that I don’t know if it’s worth my time and effort to do so, and besides, I want something that is specifically MINE, and the problem with number 2 is that I’m a total control freak, and I would want to have easy access to my site at all times to be able to update and fool around as I see fit. I don’t want to have to pay some web designer 50 bucks every time I want to add a new book review to my site, and I don’t want to have to wait around until my updates fit into their schedules. What I really want is for someone to design me a template like the one I bought from My Art’s Desire, though maybe a bit personalized, with specifically “Diana Peterfreund” graphics that I can then use on business cards, etc., that I can update and maintain with the same ease that I did with my old website. Man, I was adding stuff to that daily. Do people do that kind of web design? Where they give you a personalized template and let you run with it? I contacted one designer, and I love her stuff, but her design program isn’t supported by my Mac. And if I was going to go ahead and wait until my boyfriend buys his new PC so I could maintain whatever she designs, I might as well just do it myself and save myself the thousand bucks, since I can do Frontpage templates fine.

Just ramblin’ here…