Thoughts on creating anthonyguypatricia.com website

As a literary scholar, having to create a draft of a professional website ranks as my least favorite task of this semester. I enjoy looking at and using well-designed websites and, when I stop to think about it, I realize the skill, talent, and expertise involved on the part of the folks who put them together and get them on to the Internet. I also kind of feel that, as an employee of the university that, like in the corporate world, the university’s OIT folks or their agents should be responsible for the design of webpages, even for professors or graduate teaching assistants. Granted, in today’s world of shrinking budgets, that isn’t likely, but one can dream. I think, also, that my resistance to website design comes from the fact that working with the templates and software applications is not my area of expertise (specifically what comes to mind here is that I do not understand code, nor do I want to understand code in order to make sure a website “works” properly). To be a tad petulant about it, if I wanted to be a code reader/designer/ manipulator, I would have majored in some form of computer science rather than literature. That isn’t to say that I don’t understand that an individual’s professional website is a rhetorical construct with specific purposes and goals; I get that. Another part of my concern with website design comes from the DreamWeaver software application. I find DreamWeaver less than intuitive to use and, in my less charitable moments, downright cumbersome and irritating. Of course, this may be just my inexperience and/or lack of familiarity with DreamWeaver speaking than anything else—after all, I have almost three decades of working with MSWord and its predecessors, so word processing has long-since become second nature to me. Not so with DreamWeaver. But not all is doom and gloom. I was very happy with the template I chose to use to build my website from, perhaps mostly because of its cool gray color scheme. Not sure why that color scheme appealed to me so much, or what it “says” about my personality (like what the fact that the truck I drive is also a cool gray), but I thought it suited the online personality I wanted to create or give off to anyone who ever visits my site. I also think there is a lot of potential for developing and refining the site further as time goes on. I am frustrated (and this stems from my sense that DreamWeaver is not as intuitive and easy to work with as it could be) that the text and graphics on some of my pages does not align properly, as well as with all of the extra line spacing DreamWeaver seems to think is essential but is line spacing I did not put into the original docx and htm files I created in MSWord. Still, in the overall scheme of things, these are probably rather minor details that can be dealt with to my satisfaction later on.