Kentucky Golfing is Now Live

June 25, 2008 ·
Filed in Web Development ·
7 Comments

I just wanted to take a moment to introduce the reason that I’ve been virtually non-existent blogging here on Random Jabber over the last few months (I promise I’ll do better). My third site Kentucky Golfing went live a couple weeks ago and I’m slowing trying to build content and get some interest from local golf nuts like myself.

Take Note: This is What Not to Do

It’s really amazing that this site is finally online. I attribute it being online to my stubborn attitude. I am one of the most competitive people that I know and I hate to lose. Even though this site has been three years in the making, I was bound and determined to succeed and get my idea out there.

I bought the domain name kentuckygolfing.com in 2005 and started to gather ideas for the site. I wanted the domain kentuckygolf.com but it was taken and after contacting the owner, they wanted something like $5,000 for it if memory serves me correctly, so I told them to keep it. Kentuckygolfing.com in my eyes was the next best thing to choose from the available domain names that I could think of. At the time was really into TextPattern and I actually started to developed the site using TextPattern. I was really hung up on getting the “perfect” design rather than just getting it online and tweaking as I went and after around four design changes, I started development. To make a very long story short, at the time I just couldn’t wrap my head around TextPattern enough to do what I wanted to do with the site and luckily for me I stumbled upon ExpressionEngine (EE) because it does everything that I’ve ever needed to do with a site and it’s intuitive enough for a someone like myself who has virtually no programming experience to develop an awesome site. The only problem from that point was all of my ideas. Instead of setting up a simple blog and maybe an image gallery to start, I wanted the whole package and I didn’t go live with the site until I had the whole package developed. Given the chance to do this over, I wouldn’t go this route and I definitely wouldn’t recommend this route to anyone looking to publish their own site. The main thing to keep in mind is to just get it online and out there for the world to see. You can build on it when it’s live and getting traffic. Don’t do it bas-akward like me! I’m actually starting development on my fourth site: logogala.com and I can guarantee you that I won’t make the same mistakes again.

So, after a few more design changes once making the switch to EE and three years later here we are, the site is finally online and I’m left wondering where the site could have been today had I just got it online then instead of now. It’s fun to speculate what could have been, but it’s live now and that’s all that matters. I have to continue to move forward and just see where it goes.

Thoughts?

If you have any thoughts on the site, good or bad, feel free to leave me a comment and let me know. I’ve had one person tell me already that the login section in the header is off in FireFox 3 on Mac and I’m looking into that.

If you’re in Kentucky and into golf, feel free to sign up for an account and visit the Kentucky Golfing Forums and spark up some conversations.