A new look for ianbek.kg
Those of you who have visited the site before will notice that something is new … very new!
I have decided to rework the site because, although the old version was perfectly adequate as a platform for posting observations and comments, as the site got bigger it was proving to be difficult to use. It was particularly difficult to find posts on a particular theme.
As a result I have decided to update the software and hence the new look.
For the record – I was using Microsoft Front Page – and now I am using WordPress.
That doesn’t mean that I didn’t like Front Page – as I say, it was (is) very straight forward to use – indeed that’s one of the reasons I chose it a couple of years ago when I was resurrecting the site. The last thing I wanted to do was to sit down and learn a whole new computing language – HTML – and FrontPage offered a nice WYSIWYG, (What you see is what you get), option … similar to the environment with which I was already familiar – having been a long time user of Microsoft Office products.
It’s just that I was beginning to find it difficult to manage the number of posts and some people told me that they had difficulty looking through the posts. So, I looked at a number of different platforms and, eventually, one of our consultants persuaded me to try WordPress. It offers a lot of different possibilities – categories, tags and searches. It also gave the opportunity for readers to comment on posts – although I still have to get to grips with that.
(At the moment, the comments that you see are a selection of comments that I have received – orally, in the post or by email – so they are all from “Guest” and, to be honest, I have edited them as I have entered them, to remove any personal messages that were in them.)
There’s still a lot of work to do … I have only transferred about half of the posts, so far. In the meantime, the old site is still available … and I’ll put a link to it here.
Another problem that I encountered with Front Page was that there were difficulties in uploading posts. (That’s partly to do with the way that Front Page works, and partly to do do with our service provider that hosts the site … and, probably, partly to do with me.) Using WordPress I am able to update the site interactively, so new posts will appear as when they are written rather than a batch of them appearing once a week.
There are some other problems … for example, I don’t get quite the same freedom over the choice and size of fonts – or, at least, I haven’t learned how to do that yet … but there’s plenty of time for that.
As I said, there’s still a fair amount to do, which will take me some time – but I hope you will bear with me over the next few weeks while I get on with it.
Oh, yes, and I hope you like the new look!
Let me know what you think:
Bishkek