There are a lot of reasons that I have been in the process of making and improving my website, not the least of which is because it helps me with my online presence and gives me a place to express my creativity. Throughout the process of writing blogs and coding the website to post them on, I have learned more than on any project I have ever done before. I would like to take this time to look back at all the things that I have learned in this process and hopefully you will be able to see why I have a strong desire to continue to do this.
This website started out as a YouTube channel. It was the spring of 2020. I had just got out of school for fall break and had heard that there was a great possibility that we would not be returning to school for the rest of my senior year. Not much later, that was confirmed, and it was questionable that I would not even be able to participate in graduation. I wasn't sure that I was ever going to see some of my friends again. With this weighing on my heart, I made a video and uploaded it to the YouTube channel. It is still up on that YouTube channel and can be seen at the link at the top of the website. Luckily, I was able to participate in my high school graduation, but it was far from normal.
Then come the freshman year of high school. I decided that I wanted to take my online presence a little more seriously. With that in mind I created a google site. This site was on the google subdomain. I created a discord server and set it up nearly exactly how I wanted. At that point in time, it was extremely difficult for me to change the fonts in the google sites. I would have to literally gather the fonts from google fonts and add it as HTML. I know this was a huge step, but it seemed minimal as most people wouldn't find the google site and it didn't help my online presence at all. I knew the next step was to get my own domain, but I wasn't even sure what it was called at the time. (For those who don't know, a domain is like sethpohle.com. I was using the sites.google.com/published-site type of subdomain.) I did a little bit of research and learned what it was called and decided to get one that I could publish to. Next thing I know, I had the sethpohle.com domain and linked my google site to it. I started writing a lot more blogs and tried to make the website as professional and smooth as possible to give any visitor to my website the best experience possible. Having this domain, put my website onto google search. This was the first time that I saw something that I had this level of control of on google search and it made me very proud. But it didn't distract from that fact that my work was far from over. I continued to work on my discord server as well, making in a place where people could sign up to get notified about anything that was getting posted. I created my own discord bots to help control the server. I had a friend who was willing to give me a few pointers about where to get started and then I took off and was able to learn a ton about this art as well. As I kept working on the ideas behind Seth Pohle Media, I decided to try and do some sort of a podcast, however, this never got off the ground because it takes more time to make a podcast than it does to write a blog post and I feel that I am able to get my point across much better in writing. So, I continued making blog posts without really advancing my website very much, until late in the Spring of 2022.
In Spring of 2022, I decided that I was going to attempt to take my website off of google sites. I felt like I was not going to let the limitations that were set by the google sites software hold me back from improving my website. So, I looked up several tutorials on this and made a plan of how I was going to do it. I knew I wouldn't be able to work on the transition during the school year, so I started working on it right at the beginning of the summer before I started my summer job. The first iteration of the website was completely in dark mode and had blogs, a home page, a get apps page, and an about me page. I made the hard decision to get rid of the discord channel. The discord channel was not serving any purpose anymore as I was not seeing any room for improving it and the service it was providing was minimal. The get apps page was to advertise some new apps that I was working on developing. I did code the apps and I learned a lot about it, but I never ended up releasing them as the app stores would want money to release them. Therefore, I made the hard decision to abandon the idea of releasing the apps that I had already coded. While following tutorial to create the website, I looked at it and attempted to understand every line that I was putting down so that I could understand how stuff changed appearance to look the way that it did. I continued to work on the website to make it my own. I uploaded it and was extremely proud. Since I coded my website, I have been able to look over it and continually improve it. Every time that I improve on the website, I learn something new. Many of the people that visit this website don't notice all the small changes that are made to make the user experience a pleasant one. This project keeps presenting new challenges around every corner and I can't wait to see where it takes me next.
Thanks,
Seth Pohle