It's hard to believe it's been 6 months since my last review. I had titled it with "#1" as if it were part of a series, so I guess it's about time to make it so. Exteriorly not a lot has changed on the site since my last review. I was able to add an actual homepage. Is it exactly what I had planned? 

No. 

Is it perfect? No. Was I able to learn some things? Yes.

In the past several months, I've worked my way mostly through a Web Development series on Lynda (the learning system on LinkedIn). Which, by the way, I actually highly recommend. I say actually because I did have my doubts about Lynda but I like it better than Coursera or other online courses. Part of the course is dedicated to CSS, which is sadly my greatest downfall. I like to think I can learn things fairly well. After all, I did have to muster through biochemistry and the citric acid cycle, got a master's in Physiology, and have a paper being published which I did the statistical analysis for. 

But CSS... I just can't mentally wrap my head around these words the teachers use. So when it came to my homepage and all its glorious plans, I was a little stumped. It did have quite a bit of animation and transitions I gave up on. And perhaps some odd angles I also gave up on. Which left me with boxes. Simple boxes. Well...sort of simple. Obviously, I wanted them to adjust and move depending on the window or device. I just didn't quite remember how. Was it block? They are block things. What about inline-block? They are in a line... Or Flex? That sounds right...ish. Things should move or flex. Then there was relative vs auto vs absolute. 

Now had I been using WordPress would I have had to concern myself with any of this? No. Would I have partially given up and created two slightly-different homepages visible for desktops vs tablets/phones? Ha, probably not.  Was that wise? Also, probably not. But I also would have been stuck with whatever someone else had created. True, you can mess with WordPress CSS... it's just not super easy in my opinion. Therefore, I focus on site functionality and leave specific coding to the professionals. (Sidenote: to read about my great "fun" with WordPress plugins, you can read my first work-blog) 

Here though, I can easily mess around with the different settings and see what happens. I can easily add classes to rows or sections and see which ones work the way I want. It's a learning process. And I do have errors or things I know I could have been better at. Which I may or may not get to before swiping the homepage for my next wave of inspiration. But I'm not upset about it, the whole process is fun. 

Beyond the front page, I've set up my nice https, which I did need the Webflow guide for. Then I set up a possibly horrible tagging system to create 'related blogs'. Since the content is limited to 30 fields, I can only have 2 tags per blog, but it's good enough for now. 

I've also discovered Google Search Console and recently attempted to add structured data to my blogs. Not entirely sure if it worked. But I no longer get errors. So that's a plus. And adding a little code box is pretty simple. Also something I haven't been able to do on WordPress. Granted I haven't tried, but it's not exactly obvious.

So in the end, will I ever leave? Probably not. Will I volunteer to build sites for other people? Also, probably not. I'll keep my possible errors and long exercises of 'trial and error' to myself. And keep my stress to a minimal "Oh fuck, I just broke it all" and not a "Oh fuck, I'm about to be fired."