I am spending a lot of time this week doing rather mundane website maintenance. I like doing experiments on cells, reading about science and trying to work out what the results really mean. I don’t like maintaining a website! Apart from a compulsory wordprocessing course at university I have never taken a computing class in my life. I know nothing about writing HTML, CSS or managing databases. So even routine maintenance on this website is a bit of a struggle for me.
This website is created using something called “WordPress”. There are two different types of wordpress, a “hosted” version called wordpress.org which you can use for business and a self-contained version that you can use for personal websites called wordpress.com. If you are looking to create a free website for a community group/club or to keep your family and friends up to date on your news then wordpress.com is the way to go. It doesn’t cost anything, you just have to register and the people at WordPress keep it all up to date (the only downside is you can’t use plugins.)
You can add to and extend wordpress.org using “plug ins” I have 16 plugins running on this site to make it work the way I want. The trouble is, I am dependent on the 16 people who created these plugins to update them every time a new version of WordPress is released (roughly a couple of times a year). I know nothing about writing software so it’s not something I could do myself.
So what is the point of this post? Well, basically there isn’t a post on cancer tonight because I’m still trying to sort out the website. I view the website in Firefox, so if you are using Internet Explorer or Google Chrome and something looks funny or has stopped working please let me know! Also if you are finding the site slow to load, please let me know so I can try and fix it.
What has changed? The biggest addition is the “Popular Posts” section, at the top left of the homepage and the news page. There are hundreds of posts on this website and finding the information is getting harder, hopefully having a selection of the posts most people are reading will help you find the information you are looking for.
If there are any new features or things you would like to see on this website, please let me know, you can use the contact form to send me an email. Thanks.
If you are more impressed with the images than the text “
