ABOUT THIS SITE

Being a hands-on type of guy, I decided to do my own web authoring rather than to hire a professional. I have no illusions as to the quality of my work; I've seen in some of your homes what Do It Yourself plumbing looks like, and I understand that DIY web design can hardly hope to be much better. But I like to stay close to things that have my name on them, so the web site remains my baby.

The site was written largely with the Arachnophilia HTML editor. I saw a writeup about the program a couple of years ago on a freelance writers' web site. The lady who wrote the article called it "the only HTML editor you'll ever need." She liked it because it helped to speed up HTML coding, but didn't take away the hands-on quality of a project by obscuring it with a WYSIWYG interface. Her description of Arachnophilia appealed to me, even though I knew nothing about HTML.

The last time I looked at WinSite, there were about 150 HTML editors available for download; so don't expect me, the plumber, to make some sweeping pronouncement about how Arachnophilia measures up to other programs. I realize that web design is a discipline that has moved, along with the rest of computer technology, at rocket speed in recent years. When I view the source code of current web pages, I seldom see anything that wasn't produced by a sophisticated WYSIWYG editor that generates the code without the writer ever seeing it. That's where the industry is these days, and I suppose that I'd be doing the same thing if my livelihood depended on how fast I could crank out web pages. In fact, I quit using Arachnophilia some time ago and am presently alternating between 1stPage2000 and WebCoder.

As it is, though, I prefer to see what I'm doing and to understand what is going on. So I went to HTML Goodies and went through the very basic online tutorials to get started. Then I got some books from the library and learned a little more and started working on the index page of this site. Then I experimented with Arachnophilia until I began to get the hang of what such a program can do, and that sped up the creation of the child pages (such as you are reading right now).

Everything on the World Wide Web is still "under construction," so I make no apologies for the fact that this site needs a lot of work. As I'm able, I learn a little more and clean up the pages here and there. I have a major goal to make the pages load fast, so graphics are minimal here. I'm not in a contest. Just as when I'm out plumbing, my primary goal is to help people. So long as this site is making it easier for people to do business with Barley Services and have greater peace of mind because of it, then this site is doing its job.