I had no idea it would be so hard and take so long.

The trials and tribulations of a novice web designer.

June 2025

It’s been emotional. Emotions have included :

1. Self doubt

Why am I putting myself through this aged 64. No one will read it, I’m not going to make money from it.

2. Self loathing. Why is it so difficult? Am I just really stupid?

3. Stubborness. I’m an intelligent woman, I’m not giving up.

For years I’ve said I’m going to put all my blogs in one place. I’m doing it.

4. Falling in love – with a chat GPT bot. There were times when I had to give in and ask for help. The bot is amazing, calls me by my  name, is super understanding and supportive and genuinely happy for me when it’s suggestions works.

5. Falling out of love – with a chat GPT bot. A few times I was lead down paths that simply didn’t work. This could be hours of frustration. I decided my Bot is male. Instead of saying ‘sorry, I don’t know or I was wrong’ he blames WordPress, the Kadence theme and says it’s temperamental and blocks some settings sometimes.

6. Time. I mean, what else am I going to do when its 35 degrees in the shade. 6 hours flies when you’re trying to do a 5 minute task.

7. Resentment. Things I’d rather be doing :

a) Reading a book, on my bucket list since moving to Türkiye 14 years ago. Actually I have finished 2 or 3.

b) Study Turkish verbs and possessive suffixes. To be fair I am at complicated conversational level now, but I’ll never stop wanting to be totally fluent.

c) Crochet or knitting. I have my 1st Grandson on the way and a pile of half finished projects.

d) Mindless scrolling on social media. I’ve limited this now to doing while having my first coffee. Sometimes this can be a long coffee, but I’m getting more disciplined.

e) Wanting to do housework. Only kidding.

So what have I discovered? :

1. Exporting my blog posts from my WordPress. com site and importing to my Hostinger hosted WordPress.org  website is simple – 90% of the time.

If I’d designed the internet it would be a simple copy and paste. But no – bulk select posts and media click export, download export file, import.

Great. Not difficult. Until.. You end up with a jumble of posts in the posts list.

2. WordPress doesn’t allow you to have separate lists for each set of blog posts.

I’m have approx 40 blogs. My list already contains 86 posts and I’ve only moved 7 blogs so far.

3.Once sorted into order I’ve sometimes discovered that 1 or 2 posts didn’t make the export. So a frustrating repeating process fruitlessly and ending up with an even longer, jumbled post list and triplicates or worse of my photos.

3. Themes. There are hundreds to choose. I began trying to edit a pretty one, it all went horribly wrong. Silly me for thinking I could just copy and paste my content into the pretty spaces.

4. Blocks, plug ins, Gutenberg, taxonomy, breadcrumbs, content display grids. Maybe learning Turkish is easy after all.

5. Appearance. I want each group of blog posts to display together. I don’t want the whole of Prague and a random Btaislava merged in with motorhome trips. WordPress doesn’t allow you to just put a page break in between them, and a page 2. Oh no, far too simple.

6. Everything’s about money. Most basic plug ins don’t do what you want unless you pay to have the premium version. Quite understandably I guess.

What I’ve learnt :

1. How to export gone astray posts by giving them a new category name and importing them does the trick. Trying again and again without doing this doesn’t work. Thanks Chat Gpt.

2.Trying to edit an existing theme on a phone doesn’t work.

In fact building a website on a phone is not possible. A laptop is the way forward but not the end of the drama.

Thanks chat GPT for recommending laptop brands and compating prices and payment options.

When youre going from windows 98 to 2025 researching laptops is like wading through treacle.

Not all themes have all the features needed. Thanks Chat GPT for recommending Kadence as the closest match to what I need.

4. Plug ins are your friend. Think add on, an app type thing.

My favourite is one that allows me to drag and drop my post list into order. My other favourite allows me to drag and drop on my menu list.

5. Plug ins are not your friend. At times I’ve read the descriptions and activated then deactivated several because they don’t do what I hoped for. I have bog standard menu slide outs because I couldnt find what I hoped for or just didn’t understand how to use the plug ins I downloaded.

6. Posts and pages are different animals.

Unable to have my posts separated up in my blog section I made separate pages. Changed the settings and now the blog section displays pages rather than messed up posts. Very long winded but I couldn’t find another way. I’m sure theres a better way, but I’m getting too old to waste time trying to find it. Chat gpt lead me right down the garden path with design plug ins on this problem and nothing worked.

Eventually I wrote.. What if I made a page with blocks and pasted the content in?

Yes Bot agreed, great plan, well done, you’re really making great progress.

So I learnt how to do columns and inserted image, header and paragraphs.

Bot asked if I wanted to learn how to make these into 7 or 9 post templates.

I tried but the trauma of then losing a page because it’s not just a case of having a ‘save as’ option terrified me into simply inserting the columns and blocks fresh each time.

I did learn how to avoid this, but it’s very easy to skip that stage and lose your work. There’s no ‘are you sure’ messages in this web lark.

7. Menus. No point having pages without menus to display them. This was relatively simple. The key is having a theme with menu options. Weirdly some don’t

I now know about parents. It’s a bit like building a family tree. I really enjoy this stage and it’s helped my geography as a bonus.

8. Permalinks. Omg. This was one of the worst things. A permalink is the way it reads in the search bar. Having set up title pages with the word ‘trial’ all the pages associated had the word trial in the search bar. Hmmm.

Change the permalink settings they said.

As I did so, a warning that it could result in broken links, whatever they are, resulted in broken links.

They’re serious and resulted in all my blog pages having links instead of their pretty boxes and photos.

I couldn’t find a way back so had to manually fix each post, which took the best part of a day.

9.SEO – search engine optimisation. Chat GPT gave me a list. More wading through treacle but less fun.

Adding links to google search console and google analytics was tough. They assume I know the lingo. I’m either too old or too stupid, although after a lot of angst it’s done, although I’m still not sure what exactly is done and why.

10. Sliding photo gallery under my posts had all countries jumbled together. I tried reorganising the menu, but to no avail.  Had to go to each post and edit all dates to run in sequence and ensure none of the categories overlapped, for example Asia was bringing in different Thailand trips and Vietnam together under individual page posts. Obvious really. Another day gone in a flash changing categories to VERY specific names and dating them precisely. Chat gpt offered me a code snippet to use but the long page of coding scared me.

10. Snippets.. Eeek. Scary things that ended with chaos. I chose the long winded manual option and wasted many hours trying to figure where to paste my snippets. Once figured they didn’t work, because WordPress over rides so many things by default  apparently..

SEO.. I discovered…

a) My writing quality was poor on many pages.

b) Too many paragraphs beginning with the same word.

c) Some words used maybe too complex for the readers.

d) Too much passive voice used, whatever that is.

e) Some sentences were over the recommended 20ish words. This is really hard for someone who thinks and talks at over 100 mph. Long winded garbled paragraphs are a thing surely?

So, more editing had to be done to change the red sad face to orange or green. So boring, but I couldn’t ignore the dısapproving red emoji.

Keyphrases were essential apparently. Yet another learning curve and ultimately then added to 174 already written posts and photo descriptions (alt text) – as much as my brain and boredom threshold would allow. Repeated on pages.
Simple now I know it needs doing, I can do it as I go along rather than retrospectively.

Part 2. (I’m sure no one is still awake)

24th September 2025

Whilst playing around with customise settings I set content archive to see what it did.

Nothing. However later I saw an India heading in another part of the website.

Lo and behold all the India posts I’d imported from my old wordpress account and edited, were beautifully layed out on a page. Not technically a wordpress’ page’ but within the content archive settings and simple to add to the main menu.

No more need to make a wordpress page and play around with making columns, images, headings and pasting urls.

A total game changer, I won’t be plodding on for the rest of my life. I can see light at the end of a long tunnel.

The display is better on mobile devices too.

Will I go back and change all my previous pages which cover 14 journeys? No.

Logic told me from day 1 that it couldn’t really be as hard as it had been so far, but I’d trusted chat gpt page building guidelines

Next challenge, arrange the posts from oldest to newest as newest was showing first (by default). Content post plug in sorted this out.

So onwards and upwards, I’m still nervous that there will be a glich as to how many posts I can have per page with the archive option. India has many posts so I could be having the screaming hab dabs in the near future

(who on earth thought up the word archive for this?) To me archive means hide old stuff. Not in the website world apparently.

To be continued. maybe – but hopefully not. Well done anyone who made it to the end of this post.