Dipping my toe into the digital pond
The fabulous set-up for this website comes from the artistic efforts of a lady called Jemma Pollari. A Sunshine Coast-based photographer, author and creator versed in the dark arts of website creation. Apart from running her own successful media business, Jemmia is the current Chairperson for the Queensland Writers Centre. Do have a look at her website.
Jemma’s workshop
Jemma presented a hands-on website creation workshop for our writers’ group, the Bundaberg Writers Club. The club members responded enthusiastically. The workshop proved to be so popular that attendance had to be restricted. There wouldn’t be enough time to help everyone in need of assistance, and there were a lot of us. The sessions, presented over two days, walked us through building an effective website tailored to our needs as writers. The first day was about understanding the workings of web design. Once we had all downloaded all the software necessary, Jemma instructed us on how to access and update our new sites. The second day was more of a fault-finding exercise, troubleshooting and answering questions. There was a lot to take in, and I must say that I did suffer a bit from information overload.
Wipeout!
After the initial excitement of having a website, I am pained to say that it got relegated to the back burner. I was concentrating on editing my manuscript, all 300 pages, and disappeared down the rabbit hole of research. Jemma pulled me back with emails, checking on my progress. I have to admit my blogging wasn’t progressing very well at all. I shouldn’t own up to that, but I think that I should be honest. As we all know, when dealing with social media and putting yourself out there, it’s best to be honest.
Opening a dodgy spam email corrupted my hard drive. I lost a lot of my document files. Some files were unrecoverable. Luckily, my manuscript and photo files are all backed up on an external hard drive and are safe. I lost a large number of files in the clean-up. The documents and access to the instructional videos that Jemma sent disappeared into the ether.
It took time. With perseverance, I recovered most of my important files. Once I restored as much as I could, I reached out to Jemma. She put me back on track with some of her after-care. All I need to do now is produce some relevant articles for my site.
Join me next time in lessons on lazy research.
