I have never been much of a technical person; I know how to make my Macintosh do many of the basic things I want it to do. But websites were a bit beyond me. I hired others to create them and maintain them. All I wanted was a site that looked like I wanted it to and did what I wanted.

That didn’t always turn out to be easy or even possible. I made compromises at every turn.

And when I wanted to update the site, I had to get someone else to do it, which involved spending more time explaining or communicating what I wanted and also waiting until the person was available to make the updates. And the changes weren’t always exactly the way I wanted them, of course.

Well, the straw that broke the camel’s back was that I spent most of my month off this summer (I take two months off traveling-one in the summer and one in the winter) trying to set up a new site to host and sell my online book writing and publishing course. I hired a tech guy to do it, but he kept throwing it back on me to “populate” the site with content and links. The task was just beyond my expertise. I hired another assistant locally to help me figure it out, but she was more lost than I was. In the end , the site got up (after countless hours of work and lots of money spent), but it is too difficult for me to change or update easily.

I was determined to find a better way. And I did. Using some Mac software called RapidWeaver and a hosting site called SiteGround. I soon had three new sites up and running. I did each of them in several hours. They were actually on the web several hours after I conceived of them.

I bought a domain name (the www.___.com address that lets people know how to get to your site) and bought a year of hosting (the place that my site sits so people can access it) and created the first site in a few hours for less than $200 for everything. (Once I created the second and third sites, my cost per site went down to less than $100 for the year for each site). The more I create, the closer to $70 per year per site it will be. And the quicker I get at creating them.

And I can update the sites in minutes and easily. The software is easy enough for any non-technical person to use after about 10 or 15 minutes of instruction or guidance.

And that is one of the things I will be showing participants at our Boot Camp this Spring in Santa Fe.

Cool. I feel so empowered. And I only spent two days of my vacation learning and implementing it. (I read two books as well–Xenocide by Orson Scott Card and Brother Odd by Dean Koontz).

I’m kicking back for the rest of the time. Happy New Year.