How to make a website with little to no HTML or CSS knowledge – aka Geekulous Origins

I thought this post would be fitting for the unveiling of Geekulous. Over the past year, Gadget Girl Review has started and stopped, I would add a few posts here and there and then would stop for a few months, then start up again and then stop. This time I’m 3 months and 19 posts in (longer than I’ve ever been) and I’m not about to stop now. Since the Gadget Girl Review has a history of starting and stopping and because I wanted to, Gadget Girl Review has been changed to Geekulous. I wanted a name that was a little less ‘vanilla’ than Gadget Girl Review. I knew when I started this blog again that I was going to be rebranding it and building a customized website but I did not know how much time and effort would go into making the transformation from Gadget Girl Review to Geekulous.

Going into what I refer to as the “transformation” I thought all I would have to do was find a WordPresstemplate, copy it, paste it into the WP CSS editor make some tweaks and voila! But boy was I in for a big surprise. I was looking for a simple template that I could edit to make my own. Geekulous is no ordinary website so an ordinary, cookie cutter template wasn’t going to work. I consider myself to be intelligent and I usually pick things up pretty quickly but that CSS stuff was turning out to be much more difficult than I had expected. (most likely due to the fact that I wanted to do more advanced things than I knew how to do).

After a few days messing around with WordPress and becoming increasingly more frustrated with every attempted site edit, I hopped onto Google to see what kind of services/software was available to me to make this process a little easier. I found DreamWeaver, “perfect solution” I thought, I can drag and drop, copy and paste and edit the site visually then export the CSS pop it into the WP CSS editor and that would be that. “Perfect solution” I thought, until I saw the price tag ($399). My goal was to put as little money as possible into Geekulous to get it started, I certainly didn’t have an extra $399 lying around so as quickly as it was on, DreamWeaver was crossed off the list of possibilities.

After some more searching I came across RapidWeaver – what I like to refer to as a ‘DreamWeaver Lite’. RapidWeaver was great, cost much less ($79) and was much less complicated but I still found myself not liking any of the base templates to build from.

“Hmph!” I couldn’t figure out how to do what I wanted to do and was getting extremely frustrated by the whole process. I took a few days off, worked on getting ahead on some posts and let my brain marinate on how I was going to go about creating a good looking, successful site. The day after I decided to take a break from building the site, I was reminded of the new blog hosting/building site called SquareSpace (a frequent sponsor of Revision3 shows).

With a renewed excitement of the possibility of creating my dream site, off I bounded to SquareSpace with the hope of finding an easier method for creating Geekulous. I quickly took advantage of the 14 day free trial SquareSpace so generously provides interested customers. I must say, SquareSpace was definitely easier. First of all SquareSpace offers you a lot of base templates to build your website from. Once you decide on a template you can go into the editing mode and change colors, fonts, widths and every other aspect of your site to your hearts content all while watching it change live on the screen. There was no code knowledge necessary. All the changes I made were done through the dashboard which hangs out at the bottom of the screen. It took some tweaking and a little extra reading to find out exactly how to get everything looking the way I wanted but once I figured it out it was smooth sailing. Next step, tweaking the template to make something I actually wanted to show people.

After about 12 revisions, I came up with what you see here today. The goal was to be classy, sleek and feminine but not overly feminine (hence the touches of pink). Because I’ve been revising, creating destroying and starting all over again my posting has become much more sporadic. That will change with the launch of Geekulous though so check back often as I will finally be able to devote all of my energies to creating great content for you, my loyal readers.