Introducing the New—& Hopefully Improved—CPRW

Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
~ George Bernard Shaw

In early July, I decided to update the look of both of my websites.  I started with this one, and while I published it and moved to my other site, I was never happy with the how the Cold Pasta re-do turned out.  Oh, I received many notes from people telling me that they liked the new site, but there were little things that drove me crazy: The section dividers were uneven. Some of the triangular dividers would not expand to fit the entire page.  The site looked crowded and less-than-neat to me.  And, the biggest reason I was unhappy was that I could not have articles on any pages but the blog page.

For a couple of days, I researched website hosts and talked to other travel writers before settling on one that would allow me to place articles on more than one page.  Because my previous host—Sitelio—did not have WordPress compatibility, I couldn’t download the old site to the new site.  That meant that I had to cut-and-paste what I wanted to move. That sounds worse than it was, to tell the truth.

The hardest two things for me were learning how to use WordPress and, even worse, trying to decide which template to use. While I was in the process of redesigning the site, I changed templates about 15 times, but I finally settled on this one.  Once I had enough transferred to the new site, I had to switch my domain to WP (which took a week), and today I had to point the servers to the new site.

I am so happy I made the change.

If you’ve been following me for a bit, you might notice that I’ve added a number of new pages—recipe, travel tips, reviews, and more. My Instagram feed shows up on the site.  My site is clean and uncrowded. I’m going to make a few adjustments as I go along, but I am so happy I made the change. I hope you like it.