Website-2 Steps Back

I have been working on and tweaking my website for almost a week. Today, I found out that my internet provider no longer offers free web hosting. I am not sure I can financially justify paying for a site, but I also don’t want ads. I am indecisive about what I want to do. How badly do I want or need a website? I did learn a lot about myself through the process of creating the site. It is enough?

I feel like I have been in some sort of energetic limbo for a long time. I could really use a few days of just practicing some internal martial arts form, like Baguazhang, and not thinking. I am so tired of trying to force the river.

Designing My Website: Part 2

Saturday I was not going to rest until I got the navigation bar to do what I wanted it to do. The visited links were purple. While I love purple, I didn’t want it on my visited links. I was like a woman possessed. Finally, I thought to type my question into the browser window. A wonderful soul in the State of Washington had an answer to my problem. I slept well.

Since then I have been like a teenager who can’t decide what to wear to the big dance. I keep on trying on color schemes and graphics. I have painted, penciled, crayoned, and photoshopped. I have changed and rechanged and rerechanged the colors of fonts. I have tiled and untiled. I have questioned who I am and what I want to say, and tried to figure out how that translates into the look of a webpage.

Yesterday, emotionally exhausted, I sat down and read the last three hundred pages of the The Reincarnationist with barely a bathroom break. Today, given a long list of my week’s todo’s, I decided to fire up Dreamweaver again.

I am determined! What color palette is that?

Beginning the Website

Terror. Complete and utter terror. I woke up this morning in a panic. Both of my parents came from very strict German households where anything short of perfection was not tolerated. My parents were better than there parents, but I still managed to grow up believing that any mistake was one too many. Many of my semesters in college and grad school I earned straight A’s.

Yet, I love to learn. This past week I have been reading a book on how to use Dreamweaver to create a website. I have done almost all of the little exercises. I finally decided, while I had the book out from the library and the concepts were fresh in my mind, it was time for me to build my own site. I was on an emotional high with the ideas, looking at the Css Web garden sites until late into the evening yesterday,

But, then the nagging started. I know next to nothing about graphic design. When I opened up Dreamweaver it looked like a foreign object again. Where did I look in my books to find out how to build a menu? All of a sudden all I saw was my ignorance. I didn’t see anything that I understood, anything that I did right. Screw beginner’s mind!! I hate it.

Yet, I am often the teacher. How can I expect anyone to follow me or listen to me if I don’t allow myself the vulnerability of being a beginner, of trying and failing, and trying again? This is how I learn empathy and compassion.

I also heard myself muttering, “On Roll Over do this…” Even as part of me is freaking out, another part of me is slowly putting together the pieces to make this thing work. How fascinating and complex is this Beginner’s Mind.