Well, THAT was an accomplishment!

A month ago I made the decision to completely overhaul both my web site and blog, rebuild the web site on WordPress and roll my existing WordPress blog into the web site. My previous web host wasn’t really the best place to do this- I was tired of having to hunt for my control panels and take tons of time uploading files from my web site program on my computer. Additionally, that old web site program just wasn’t responsive enough for tablet and smart phone screens. An awful lot of people now use smart phones and tablets to do their internet searching, and my old site just wasn’t easy to navigate that way. Only my blog was in a responsive format. I knew I could do better.

It took me a few days to research which web hosts would work best with WordPress and find the best deal for my money. There are a lot of web hosts out there, from free to fairly expensive. I knew I didn’t want a free site, not enough options there, and I didn’t want a bunch of ads popping up all over the place. I wanted someplace reliable, that knew what they were doing. Finally I settled on BlueHost as the best place to move my domain.

Before signing up, I looked at all of their tutorials on moving a domain, and set up a plan of action to get everything I needed to do done correctly. First up was checking to make sure all of the information on my domain’s ‘whois’ was correct. It hadn’t been updated for several years, so I had to take care of all that and wait for it to be changed to the correct information.

Web site design by Ellen Leigh

After signing up with BlueHost, I needed to select a template to use on WordPress. I needed one that offered some flexibility on colors and fonts, sidebars, headers and backgrounds so that I could use my artistic expertise to ‘make it pretty’. I bought one I thought I’d really like, but when it came right down to it, I didn’t like working with it for this site. So I found, and bought one called Create Pro, which I like very much! If you go to the link, you can see what I had to start with and can compare it to how I reconfigured it to make it my own.

What followed was migrating all of my blog posts over to the new site, saving some old files from the old site and spending days creating all of the new structure and pages for the web site and blog. A new menu allows the viewer to navigate from page to page and section to section in a way that I hope makes sense.

• About Ellen Leigh- sections about the company, a bit of my life story (I hope you get a chuckle out that one) and some client testimonials.
• The Gift- sections about my gifts, why I paint and how and my signature and what it means to me.
• Fine Art Paintings– several sections divided into categories.
• Wall Mural Work- another set of sections and categories
• Blog- a direct link to just the blog posts
• Contact Ellen Leigh- all the ways to find me, even snail mail.

It took me a couple of weeks to get it set up enough to start moving my domain to the new host- I will be continuing to work on some behind the scenes updating for a few weeks yet. So, last Friday I followed all of the directions to the letter and moved! My site was off-line for a couple of days, but I could still work on it while I waited.

Yesterday, it finally went live, so now you can see it and cruise around looking at all of the nifty things I have included: photo mosaics that turn into slideshow carrousels to view, lots of single photos, drop down menu bars, lots of ways to search for things, tons of information about the company and my artwork. You can look at it on your computer, your tablet or your smart phone, AND, you can phone or e-mail me directly from the site.

So, take a good look around, and let me know what you think!

Ellen Leigh

P.S. I really learned a lot by doing this, so much so that I’d consider designing web sites for others. Another income avenue? Hmmmmmm. Sounds good to me! Web site design by Ellen Leigh. Call me.