originally posted June 4, 2008
May 2021: reformatted; all links updated; text revised as noted
Though I’m still swamped with some pretty good projects, I’ve slowly taken some time this spring to begin the process of refreshing and reviving a few of my specialty websites. These are sites that I use to advertise particular, specialty services that I offer. They were still drawing traffic, but over the past few years, the sites had grown stale and—to be blunt—boring! Most of them were just plain-text HTML sites (and, I do mean plain HTML) that I used to learn website coding and meta-tagging several years back, back when sites were primarily information based and didn’t have to be so pretty to attract potential customers and hold their attention long enough for them to read a couple of lines of text!
As you know, those days are long gone!
My first primary website went live in 1997. As archaic as it was, it did have some design elements to it, and it even enabled me to venture into full-time freelancing. Over the years, I tweaked here and there and added pages as I added services and clients, answered repeat questions, and moved more and more online. Believe it or not, I used that site for more than five years. For the second generation site, I decided to hire a web designer—after all, I figured, I was only schooled in instructional design; how could I possibly learn web design? Well, like many of you, I fell into quite the learning experience with that adventure. Needless to say, that iteration of the site lasted only a year before I gave up and searched for another way to get online: I was reminded that if you want something done “right,” you’d better do it yo’self!
So, I practically did. I worked to create a template for the site and to move text into the template. Slowly, I learned HTML and tweaked to near-perfection. (That adventure grew into the third generation of the-freelance-editor.com, which is live today.) As I experimented and learned about XHTML and XML and codes and tags and CSS and SEO and keyword enrichment and the secret advantages of publishing online, I also began work on some network sites—primarily for fun. Little did I know that those sites would turn into active doorway pages.
Regardless, I am proud to announce that two of those network pages are completed, and I hope you take time to check them out. You’ll find them (without formatting, for some reason) at theWebPageEditor.com and theBlogEditor.
UPDATE: Now on the fourth generation of the-freelance-editor website, I’ve also updated the names and URLs for my network web pages. The two mentioned in the last paragraph are now the-website-editor.com and the-blog-editor.com. Other landing pages can be found on my current “specialty ‘divisions’” web page.
image information: This was the banner section of the the-freelance-editor home page from sometime in 2006 to about 2012.
