Outsourcing

Do you know the feeling that the universe is trying to tell you something when a topic keeps coming up and up and up again?  Well, I do and it just did these past days.  The New York Times had several articles on outsourcing.  One in particular, Outsource Your Way to Success, talks about how a couple invested in a housekeeper even when they were starving students to be able to focus on their studies and be more productive. I wish I had that kind of singular focus, actually, no, I do not. I’m interested in just about anything; at least for a while.  But you get the gist.  I get excited.

So, the other day I decided that it was silly to pay programmers and designers to do all the work on my websites and I could go ahead and learn with the help of templates and WordPress, or Square Space how to set up and implement websites myself.  I signed up at General Assembly for a two day class called “WordPress Bootcamp”. Our teacher Nate Cooper was awesome (that is patient, humorous, and of course, super hero knowledgeable) and off we set into the sunset.

The first day “seeing” the codes as we went into HTML and CSS was a bit of a challenge thanks to my dyslexia and setting up hosting and moving around folders with content was ever so slightly over my head, but I understood the gist of it and rolled with the punches.  I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the templates and ‘play’!   Day two we looked at child themes and my brain glazed over in an instant; maybe I wasn’t as digitally native as I thought (see earlier post, Digital Citizen). Then again, it all made sense in theory and I got the feeling that maybe, just maybe certain things I’d have to get a bit of help with. Creating child themes seemed such an example.  The rest was a breeze.

Well, let me tell you! Its two weeks later. After I managed to crash my film’s website and was shut out from logging into the sites cloud host for the better part of a day, after the mock host I had set up failed to do pretty much anything it should have done or I wanted it to do, after I found out that all the templates are, really only templates without many choices and if I wanted more choices I had to implement child themes (ha!) I had to lay down my arms (as in armor) in defeat.

The next step in my web career where panicked emails to about five programmers who happen to be in my database with the intent on hiring the first to respond.  Which, by the way was Nate Cooper who set me up with a lovely young man called Scott Palmer of The Assembly?  Scott is now in the process of cleaning up my mess. Actually, we decided that the mess was messy enough to delete and start over.  Can you spell O.U.T.S.O.U.R.S.I.N.G?

I should have known that I was out of my league, when each time I called my hosting service and started with: “please bear with me, I’m an idiot when it comes to these things, I only know enough to be dangerous”.  

Now let me sign off, I have to clean my apartment, because I let my housekeeper go. Now THAT’s a job I can do really well. The only problem is I’m not half as excited about vacuuming as I am playing with web templates.  If you know of any housekeepers that will put up with me, send them my way please.