My website

Well I have finally managed to publish my website. 1and1 - my host provider - must be so pleased to get me off their backs. They have been receiving daily emails from me for the past 2 weeks!

I have found this the most difficult and frustrating experience. Writing the course in Dreamweaver had it's problems as I made some fundamental errors as I was going along, which I only realised when I came to publish - and then of course (since I haven't used cascading style sheets) I had to correct the errors on each individual page. Very time consuming. There are still obvious errors which I have not been able to correct, e.g. why does my template does not appear in the exact same format on every page - why do some photos take a long time to download - how to size photos etc. etc.

However, writing in Dreamweaver was nothing like as difficult as publishing it in my webspace in 1and1. I have been trying to work out why I have found this so difficult and have decided that the following factors have contributed

• 1and1 make huge assumptions about the prior knowledge people have in the language they use in their help sheets
• Different language is used to describe the same thing both within their help sheets and from the different support staff I have emailed
• Using Dreamweaver rather than their own webbuilding software might have made it more difficult to follow the help sheets
• Each time I emailed the support team, someone different replied, which made it very difficult to follow through a line of enquiry

The problem is that I got so confused that in the end I have no idea how I managed it - so I will no doubt have the same problems all over again if I try and write another website. I wonder how many times my students have felt like this.

Final thought - I really could have done with a course on web design as well.