Michael & Liz are Bloggable

In college I did a ton of website development including creating a website for the Dean of Engineering (he let the domain and hosting plan expire and it got deleted) as well as creating and managing my fraternity's website( linked here ). It's still running but has been VERY neglected over the last 6 years (holy crap 6 years) and isn't quite as stable or consistent as it used to be.  Since college though I've taken a very long break from web work (outside of my full-time job which I dabble in) until last Fall.

This hasn't really been public knowledge, but last September I started doing some side jobs for a website company. I was either working on filling out content on already built sites or creating designs for new sites. After a while I struggled to find time to do anything and told them that I just couldn't do it. I really enjoyed working on the sites, but since I work on computers all day at work, the motivation to come home and continue to sit at a computer was just not there.

Well this past February I was approached by a woman named Kathy Wood, who goes to our church, to possibly help out with her non-profit organization called "Hangin' on Faith". The organization is designed to help inspire and encourage people going through difficult times using the Bible and scripture as the guide. Kathy has her own inspiring story that is worth reading on the site. Their website needed some updates and assistance. She had gotten my name from the guy who I had worked with before and wanted to see if I was interested in helping her site. At my full-time job, I'm occasionally referred to as the guy "who can't say no", so of course I offered to help.

It was clear from the start that I was either going to struggle maintaining what was currently there or I had to build a new site. It's frustrating to me to have to work around poorly constructed HTML code. I'd spend more time trying to fix what I broke with new code than I would improving the site. I'm happy to just "make it work", but if I was going to help, I might as well give it my all.

So in February I started building a new site. It probably took a lot longer than it should have, but between an indoor soccer league, 3 softball leagues, and marathon training (and not to mention having a life as a husband and homeowner), my time was stretched pretty thin. But last weekend the new website finally launched and I'm psyched to have it live. Here is a link to the new site.

For any of the dorks out there, the website is all HTML and PHP and I wrote all the code in Wordpad. GASP! Wordpad!? I know, but I hate most code editors and the code is really simple, so I use what is easiest and quickest. I created all the images using a photoshop-ish software and there is also 3 backend databases for the Stories, Newsletters, and Scriptures that are called with MySQL. I could go on and on about all the features I've added or plan to soon, but that would be boring. Suffice it to say, this site is as stable as I could make it and so far the reviews are all fairly positive.

So far there's only 2 things that bother me on the new site. I don't like how bubbly I made the left navigation links. They are just too bubbly and out of place. So eventually I plan on fixing those with something more slick and discrete. The other thing is that the product page is pretty much just copied and pasted from the old website with a few small changes. It's really not well done and eventually I'll completely rewrite it all... when I find the time!

Let me know what you think of the site! I'm eager to keep adding to it and hopefully my effort can help continue to build the following for this wonderful organization!!