When I discovered my namesake website looked like a hot mess on my new phone, it happened on the day I had slotted to begin new adventures moving forward on May 28. Everything kind of came to a screeching halt because I really need that site to be functional if not perfect. The software it is built on is outdated and obviously doesn't communicate well with new devices. The site looked exactly as expected on my computer, so I was shocked to find it in complete disarray through the phone browser.


Since then I've studied, previewed and used demos for a variety of software to decide which way to go for a rebuild. I made decisions and estimated anywhere from an overly optimistic two weeks to three months to get at least something acceptable up and running through a new program. It is really hard to estimate a learning curve so I might have even been pushing it at three months. I mean really, who knows?


Yesterday I decided to just give fixing the old software version one more try. And oh boy am I glad I did! When I had one page adjusted  in thirty minutes, I knew if methods held up, I might be done with it within a week. So I am really thrilled to announce I am done with the fixes in just two days! I say this after viewing it on all of the computer and phone devices at my disposal but there is the possibility of other devices it still might not look that great on. I don't own anything apple, so there's that!


The weirdest strangest things happened during this fix session. For example, no matter how many times I checked code, some items have white text on one device that showed up black on the other! Not only that but some of the frames behind the mysterious color changing text also displayed extremely different as well. So in the end I made a neutral color decision where either text color would show up reasonably well and miraculously, it worked! Still, some colors show up for example dark blue on one device, and light teal on the other. I seriously have no idea how this could be, but it is and I had to find ways around it and about a hundred other oddities.


There were too many never seen before issues to list here but  to give one more example that was quite stunning, I found a snip of text that kept showing up in an odd place even after I took everything off the affected page and rebuilt it. So what did I do? I applied what is equivalent to a band-aide by making a white rectagular shape that matched the background it was on, and stuck it right over that spot. Voila! No more weird text in the middle of the page.


Seriously?! This is probably the craziest thing I ever did in a website design! I HAVE NO IDEA WHY THAT WORKED no more than I do why it showed up in the first place.


So I am over a week behind but it's almost okay because going forward, I definitely need to rebuild my namesake site, WandaHopeCarter.com and more importantly I need to rebuild InspirationMotivation.com ASAP. The decisions I made and time I took to test will still pay off in that I can now move on to that project in the very near future as I'd originally planned. The software I picked will work for both sites.


I must say, I compromised on so many things just to get it to look somewhat normal, things I would have never settled for in the past. It was hard to accept the imperfections, and the urge to change content or do normal updates, and walk away until it's time to rebuild. That's not my style! It doesn't fit with my Virgo need for perfection.


There was one background that no matter what color I set it to, it always turned a deep red color! I didn't really like that but rather than struggle with it, I left it, just like I left many other things laid out in ways I wouldn't have dreamed of being okay with in the past. I still enjoy the fact that I built it old school in both software and appearance. Everything is so sterile looking online today and I built in a style more like the early websites, with color and silliness, a little humor and a lot of personal rather than professional looking elements.  


If anyone takes a look at my site, and you see serious issues, like text outside of boxes, sentences cut off, a jumbled mess of elements stacked oddly around the page, PLEASE LET ME KNOW!


Otherwise I can regroup and get back to my plans that were so rudely interrupted by the messed up website discovery.


GOD IS GOOD! My prayers about what to do were answered.


Revamped Front Page Looking Normal Again


The entire site had to be fixed!


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