Code Red

Virginia Lee · Code Red

 
​I don’t know how people who code for a living keep their sanity in check.

For context, I made my own website, using Weebly (now Squarespace). I originally used the free template, then I moved onto a paid tier so I would have a cleaner url and F E A T U R E S like SEO (that’s “search engine optimization” to you (and me) non-IT nerds. (Basically it’s a way search engines find your website. The more SEO tags the page has the more likely google and its ilk will find the page (God, I love parentheticals))).

I liked the idea of a website template that is simple to use, is drag and drop, and doesn’t have too many options to slog through. A friend recommended I try Weebly when I was first facing the fact that I needed a website.

As if being an artist isn’t expensive enough!

But I concede the importance of being easily found when one wants to be seen. Or in my case, heard. A website equals online presence. A good website, in my mind (me not being a coder), is something that is clean, easy to navigate, visually pleasing and balanced, and most importantly WORKS.

A few iterations of my website ago I decided I admired the simplicity of a smooth scrolling webpage. That’s one single page with buttons at the top that take a visitor to a specific part of that one page instead of having to slog through multiple pages of material. Considering how little time I know I have to catch someone’s attention if they’re visiting my page for the first time, I wanted to give them the pertinent stuff and weed out the fluff. I think there’s still a little too much fluff on my home page, but I have a tendency to cut too much of the fat when we all know fat equals flavor (did I mention I was a chef once?) so for now it remains.

ANYWAY, genius I am, I decided to try my hand at coding. Lord save me. I now have a lot of respect for what coders go through, after the little I was exposed to! Like any technology, it’s beautiful when it works but damn when it doesn’t it’s such a pain in the ass to figure out why it won’t.

It took days of feeling like my eyes were getting smaller and smaller as I slogged through instructions that oft didn’t work. Until finally. FINALLY. It did. And it was glorious! And glorious it remained.

Until I started this blog.

Turns out smooth scrolling only works on the page it’s coupled to! I wanted to have a separate page for this blog, to keep some kind of divide between my writing and my work-related VO stuff (check it out here!). But whenever I tried to click on the navigation link to my vocal samples or to my contact page from the blog I couldn’t get it to work. Nowhere seemed to have an answer to solve this particular coupling issue. I nearly bricked my webpage a couple of times. I felt like I was inching closer and closer to being SOL and needing to buy yet another webpage. Knowing how little time I have to keep a visitor’s attention I needed to figure out a way to remove any guessing and confusion. 

If nothing else, I am very, very good at just making things work. It took me hours but I did it! Kinda! Now I’ve got a shiny, simple TAKE ME HOME! button for visitors who somehow end up here.

Sorry! And you’re welcome! ?