Rebuilding the Site (and How It's Driving me Mad)

I finally got over my first big hurdle in revamping the site! After starting a new job that actually has down time and access to a computer I decided to buckle down and go for a proper overhaul. To be honest with you the site was a mess on the backend of things. I hadn't touched HTML or CSS in well over a decade and was impatient when I started this originally so I cheated and used a WYSIWYG editor called BlueGriffon. Eventually the inevitable happened and I wanted to change a small item on the site only to realize that due to my reliance on BlueGriffon (not to mention a lot of copy and pasting) I would have to change each individual page on the site. Add on top of that I had organized my internal file system like I would my own personal documents. While this certainly would work locally, on the web it makes remembering links an absolute nightmare. So I buckled down and did what I could to emulate my old site layout but add a few things I wanted before but never added. Let me tell you it was a fucking chore, and I spent about three weeks bashing my skull into the wall. I didn't want to use a preset layout as they either looked too "Nu-Web" or would take so much time for me to dissect and make my own I'd be better of coding it myself. Which I sorta did, but it ended up so utterly broken on mobile (I know but a lot of people use mobile now sadly) that I gave up and threw that into the trash. See I did the thing again where I get impatient and while I did do the work myself this time I didn't actually KNOW what the hell I was doing. I tried about five separate ideas before nearly rage quitting the idea entirely before I settled on a new idea.

I'm sure you can guess but I cheated again. Not near as bad as before, I did actually do the coding, but I borrowed from Cheshire's CSS tutorial project then modified it into my own. Is it 100% my own hand crafted website? Not exactly, and I'd never claim it to be, but I did do all of my modifications in Notepad and Kate (the superior text editor) which is a start. The great part is I can finally get around to fixing up everything on the backend and make this site leaner and cleaner without needing to change every last bit. It's a small improvement, as I've only finished the homepage, but it's a start.