Welcome to another Grateful Heart Monday, a weekly series dedicated to the importance of expressing gratitude in my life, which for today is for finally getting my new website up and running and the person who made it all possible, my dear friend Debbie Coon.
Many of you might not know that I have another website out there besides this one. It’s my personal website, www.andrewarthurdawson.com. I built it originally all the way back in 2012 using a very old tool on my hosting company that became outdated not more than a year after I had completed it. Beginning in late 2013, my hosting company started asking me each time I called technical support for help, whether I wanted to upgrade my personal site to their new tool. I always responded by asking them if the tool I was using was getting discontinued. The answer was consistently no. Years would pass until my site would become so outdated in technology and in appearance that the idea of updating it became one of utter dread. I simply avoided the subject and never dedicated any energy to it. More years would pass until finally this past spring, a tech support person from my hosting told me he was going to give me two free years of their website builder tool to help motivate me into migrating my site off the old tool into the new one. For as much as this became my first moment of gratitude in this process of upgrading my site, the next came when my dear friend Debbie, a genius when it comes to computer programming, offered to build it for me herself. In all honesty, I should have asked Debbie long ago to help me complete this, but my pride and ego of wanting to do it myself always got the best of me more times than I can count, even after my domain stopped getting listed on Google’s search results, all because it had gotten so outdated.
By the time Debbie started working on my new personal website, I wasn’t in any rush to complete the process given how long I had put the task off, as well as how long my hosting company had given me the tool for free. Even so, I gave Debbie some basic specifications and slowly, but surely, it started to come together. Unfortunately, I kept putting the task off of reviewing her work until I received a notice one day a few weeks ago from my hosting company that said my old tool that was still running my personal website was officially being discontinued on December 31st. Suddenly, the timetable to getting this done had to be pushed to the top of my to-do list. After several days of review and making minor changes, Debbie and I were able to finalize my site. After doing so, we then contacted my hosting company, where they did the leg work of taking my old site down and moving the site Debbie had built for me onto the Internet.
While I honestly thought the whole process would have taken a ton of my time, in the end, it was an entirely painless process that actually took very little of my time. I’m so thankful for this and for the fact that the task is no longer looming over my head anymore. But I’m even more thankful and filled with plenty of gratitude today for having a true friend like Debbie who remained so very patient with me all along the way until the process was complete.
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson
