Books don’t sell themselves. Unfortunately. You must market, publicize, convince people to write reviews for you — not rave about the book only to you. An up-to-date website also helps to sell yourself and your books. It ups your SEO on Google, a good thing as that’s how people find you. But an old-looking website plants doubt in potential readers’ minds.
So I’ve set myself a triple updating job: keep the blog pages that are an extension of Concussion Is Brain Injury updated with new info and ideas; blog regularly; and update the appearance and function of the entire site.
That last task I used to do yearly. Every year, I had to relearn what I’d done the previous year in the back end of my site: how to tweak the theme I used and how to read the HTML/CSS codes I’d copied and pasted to customize my site. Now the free — always and only use free is my motto — theme is obsolete, and I have to find a new one to customize. The problem is I feel like I can’t understand the back end anymore, it’s been years and years since I last updated (for reasons I touch on in Concussion Is Brain Injury). From my experience with SoloLearn, I know my programming knowledge is in my brain somewhere. I can relearn. But I haven’t retained what SoloLearn taught me well. Believe it or not, that is a step up. At one time I couldn’t have remembered my pre-injury programming knowledge at all, and whatever I had learnt would’ve vamoosed in minutes. So at least I can remember for a bit. It was hard to believe that though this past week as I found a new theme, tried to learn it, and all I felt was a massive wall between me and understanding.
I’m beginning this updating mountain climb with an easier site I manage. At first, the new theme was completely — I mean completely, absolutely, totally — incomprehensible to me. I’m used to clicking here, mousing there, to figure things out, kind of like how I play with my photos, trying out different looks until I find what I like. But all the options were, like, huh?‽!!! Thankfully the theme designers had made a helpful video; it just took awhile to find it.
I clicked here, played with settings there, tried and tried experimenting with almost every option to see what they would do to the site. But still the whole thing was murky. And I was seriously, painfully fatigued.
All of a sudden, I understood how their theme worked, what all the options did, how to “read” the back end. Phew.
But now I have to keep working on it, for I’ve only just begun with the basics of the site and after two days off, already began to forget how some of the options worked. I still have to relearn how to use the Events feature I installed years ago, figure out how to make some of the fonts look the way I want, and set up a gallery. And, oh yeah, why does the site title keep changing its look FFS??!!
Once I master the easier site, I’ll be set to work on my site.
If I take too many days to rest, which exhaustion probably will force me to, because with brain injury, rest is neverending, I’ll forget it all over again. Stab a fork in my eye if I have to take too much downtime and relearn it all. But right now, I’m pleased with how it’s looking and functioning . . . Except for that site title that seems to have acquired a gremlin.
