A Boomer's Guide to Building a Website

Some time around 1998, in the early days of the World Wide Web, a co-worker rushed into my office with a wild look in his eyes. "Come here," he exclaimed, "you gotta see this!" We sat down in front of his desktop computer (a Compaq?), he fired up this new application called a web browser (Netscape?), and up came a color picture of him and his family, surround by text, with a navigation bar across the bottom. It was his own personal website. "Isn't that cool?" he exclaimed. It was.

Fast-forward 17 years. These days, we're hard pressed to find a friend or colleague that doesn't have a web site, or at least a page, that identifies them as a participant in the digital age. Even our retired cohorts are likely to have a LinkedIn profile, a Facebook page, a business, hobby or family site, a blog or some other form of digital I.D. Now, when someone asks for our address, it may not have anything to do with our street, city, or state. "No, I mean where do you live online?"

Some boomers have been using personal computers since the days of the dual floppy drive and the green screen, myself included. Others of us, depending on various factors like profession, gender, geographic location and age, have managed to avoid PCs and various smart devices altogether. Some may want to get online, but suffer from the computer anxiety that bedevils so many seniors. Then there's a group of us that are more or less forced into using PCs and other devices by a wide variety of external circumstances, from staying in touch with family/friends to tracking stock prices and finding recipes.

For those of us that have become computer literate, either by choice or circumstance, the prospect of building a website can be daunting. But if for whatever reason you need to communicate and interact with the general public on a regular basis, having a website has become nothing less than a requirement. Here are a few reasons you might consider building your own site:

1. You make something (birdhouses, afghans, watercolors, saltshakers etc.) that you can sell online.

Those of us who been online a while know that there are various third party services, like Etsy and Amazon, that can sell our homemade items, as well as public blogging platforms where we can post our opinions. But if you want complete control over your content, 100% of your sales proceeds, as well as any revenue generated by advertising, you'll want your own site, perhaps in addition to leveraging other sites.

So, where to begin? As you can imagine, there's no end to online resources that can help you choose the right website authoring tools, just as there seems to be no end to the number of tools and platforms available for building, publishing and maintaining your own site. Start with an honest self-assessment of your skills:

• How computer literate are you, really? Can you speak the language already? Do you know what HTML, XML, CMS and URL stand for, or least know what the acronyms are?

If you answered "yes," and you want total control over the look and feel of your site, you'll want to consider more flexible and sophisticated Content Management Systems (CMS). You don't have to be a programmer to use them, but having a high aptitude for software development and knowledge of how the web works helps.

The more resourceful and fearless you are, the easier the website building process becomes. Find other sites that you want to emulate, find out which tool or CMS platform was used (it's generally indicated on the bottom of every page ie "Powered by WordPress," etc.), consult with your "birds of a feather" community and investigate. As with most things, you'll never know how it feels until you take it for a test drive, so try out a few tools. You can always jump ship at any time and try something else. Best of all, it's just about impossible to blow up your computer, get your data stolen by international hackers, inadvertently share your surreptitious web travels, or otherwise break anything. Be fruitful! Click, and see what happens!