Monica The Tech Geek

Most of you know, I run a website for writers. But what surprises most of my readers is that I actually have a techno-geek background. Many a person has lost a bet, when it has come to guessing my major in college. (Mathematics, and I'm not lying.)

After college, most of my marketing successes came on the shoulders of understanding data, how to store it, how to access it, how to manipulate it. I'm a crackpot programmer in database languages, and I challenge you to find a database software I can't manage.

So, how come, I was asked the other day, I'm not using a database to manage the very data-heavy content on my website, OnceWritten.com? The question came from a super techo-nerd friend of mine, who felt, I think, that I'd lost the way. I'd abandoned the data crowd in favor of my cool new literary crowd.

The thing is, that he was right. I'd developed a data-reliant website, and was hand coding each page. Egads, you can imagine how long that took me every week.

So now my new challenge is this. I'm already converting the site, but now all of a sudden all my web pages are going from a .htm ending to a .php ending to keep up with the new code. Doesn't sound like too much of a problem, does it? And really it isn't. But oh my gosh, I'm losing my very cool Google Page Rank left and right. I'm being dumped from a 5 (and even in some very cool cases a 6) to a zero for the same content. Frustrating to be sure.

However, I guess its better to do it now, rather than save it for later. I only wish, my techno geek pal had challenged me to do this much, much sooner.

There is a lesson to be learned in this tale, which is, if you are considering creating a website, and have a general "marketing" plan, or at least an idea of what you'd like to have that website do in a few years, think twice before you plop down a bunch of code, that may become obsolete in a year's time. When you have over 300 pages, as I do, you will not be ecstatic about re-coding every page.

And for those of you checking in at the website periodically, be patient with the changes. They are happening slowly, but surely, and I'm trying to cover my tracks. If you happen to catch a link to nowhere, do let me know, so I can get those loose ends taken care of.