It's good to be back!

It's been a while, too long. But I'm back in the game and with a tall tale to tell.

After my previous web hosting was due to be cancelled around Christmas 2020, once my previous web designer called time and said they weren't in the web site business anymore, and faced with an increasing number of Word Press widgets that were broken/needed upgrading, I decided to pay for someone else to re-design the site and give it a makeover - given that it was 2010 I initially had it re-done to the familiar look it had for 10 years, I thought it was due a reboot.

Sadly, the individual who was commissioned to design the site initially said they woul take 6 weeks - they saved all of the images and I provided them with some visual examples of other web sites that looked similar to how I wanted it revamped. Nothing major but something a bit more visual and easy on the eyes.

The 6 weeks then turned into around 6 months and I had zero contact from the web designer who, once they finally contacted me, had been not been working on it at all and had been off doing something else despite taking a deposit on the work.

More months passed and it was late in the year when they showed me what they had done and, quite frankly, it was terrible. With the 1 year hosting with a new provider due to expire and with not actually having a web site to run on it, I decided against renewal come Christmas 2021.

But that included the domain name too. As renewing the domain would involve renewing the hosting, I let it lapse, assuming the popcornpictures.co.uk name would quickly fall back into public domain and I'd buy it again.

Only it didn't and I've been waiting nearly 3 months for that lapsing process to finally finish. And on the day I write this, March 31st 2022, I once again secured (after a stressful auction where someone else tried to snipe the name) the domain name popcornpictures.co.uk. The registration with Nominet is back underway and I'm still the owner of the domain I've owned since 2000.

Rather than risking being stung again and not having the first clue about designing a web site on Word Press as the previous site was constructed on, I've decided to do my own on Wix, a rather brilliant free web builder. It may lack some of the features I'm used to but for what it offers, it's an excellent package. And if things turn out well over the next few weeks as I rebuild the site, then I can quickly upgrade to pay-per-hosting and get rid of the free adverts. The web site will be experimental for the next few weeks as I tweak things around but hoping to get everything good-to-go by the end of the Easter holidays.

Once the popcornpictures.co.uk domain is sorted out, I'll be switching over the web links to something other than the generic one it's given me! And given I'm using some generic template to work around right now, there's going to be a lot of "random" stuff on here that's not mine but I'll get around to editing/removing.

It's time to start writing and reviewing again!