What Tangled Webs

What's a website for?

Not long after graduating from the University of Pittsburgh, I built a website. The service that provided my shiny new personal email address offered a smidgen of space, and I was eager to try my new hypertext coding skills. I’d been provided access to the not-quite-public Internet through computer labs, learning how browsers worked and data packets moved.

I’d wanted to be a journalist. That department turned me down. It had nothing to do with my educational background, my grades, or the quality of my writing. I had to work full-time. Required courses for the major weren’t offered nights or weekends.

Visiting the AT Research Library at the AT Museum. Hooray for librarians!

Defeated, I selected a newly-minted major where I could take courses at night: Information Science. It melded the research and categorization skills of Library Science with the technical skills required in Computer Science. I had the tech side covered thanks to community college, where I ran a computer lab under a work-study program to help cover my tuition.

A tip of the hat to librarians: learning how to research, organize, index, and present information to different audiences gave me foundational skills to become an author. I enjoyed these courses the most, especially paired with ones I took for a psych minor. Courses in graphic design taught me which colors soothe and which ones scream.

If I’m not mistaken, Las Vegas pioneered screaming neon

One class sticks with me to this day: The Design of Everyday Things. Based on the book of the same name by Don Norman, which has been re-released and updated many times since it first came out in 1988.

We’re all wired with biases and expectations about how the world functions. I think about this every time I grab a handle that doesn’t open, or see an Open sign lit in neon red (and Closed in neon green). We expect stop signs to be red. Doors handles to pull, not push. A steering wheel to steer.

Even if you can’t read the language, you know what this means

It’s about product design (which we applied to web design in our course) through a lens of cognitive psychology. How do we make the choices we present to people easier to follow? By cutting through the noise, the random clutter, to enable easy decision making. A leads to B leads to C.

I called my first website Cyberwall. Throw something against a wall in cyberspace that isn’t inside a walled garden (AOL and CompuServe were big then) and it sticks! I’d already been a newsletter editor and desktop publisher and was writing for newspapers and magazines at the time so I saw this as a new way to publish. I’d put little nuggets about places I’d been recently, categorized by topic. Thumbnail photos in those dial-up days. Nothing fancy. It evaporated when I left that particular email service (and life) for another.

My author website went live soon after I resumed use of my maiden name. A professional move. I could hand out business cards with a URL at book signings and conferences. A few years later, I attended a Society of American Travel Writers Travel Writing Institute in Orlando. One of the teachers, Lee Foster, had great success in re-purposing his print travel stories to sell to CompuServe. When he looked at my body of work, he said “with your skills, you should syndicate online!”

The SATW Institute spent many years at the Courtyard at Lake Lucerne in Orlando

So I did. Friend Travels didn’t last long, however. Posting stories was one thing, selling them another. Another idea took root: Florida Hikes. I was now part of the staff for the SATW Institute and Lee encouraged me even more, since I had physical objects (books) I could encourage people to buy while keeping the content of the books updated on my website.

In just a few days, FloridaHikes.com celebrates its 20th anniversary. I began with a blog, but shifted to a database format a year later. The look and presentation has stayed stable for years since it works. Why reinvent for the sake of reinvention?

I launched it on Groundhog Day 2006, but this was the first screenshot I took

A few years later, I integrated map-based search and ran a forum. That tired me out!

And here’s what FloridaHikes.com looks like now.

Other than a pleasant break to canvass St. Augustine and Jacksonville with SATW colleagues, my January has largely vanished into two other websites that needed reworked.

Like most authors, my personal website languishes without updates for long periods. I’ve given it a fresh face and copied some of my previous newsletters over to it.

Take a look at the new SandraFriend.com.

Our travels came to a screaming halt in 2020 so the website I’d launched for John and I to share our travel stories sat untouched. Now I’ve moved the site to a host that takes care of the techie stuff for us so we can write as we roam.

This updated version also sends out each new article automatically to anyone who subscribes. If you’d like to follow along with us, pop on over to the newly relaunched TrailsandTravel.com and sign up.

New look, a few new stories, and more to come! Join us.

So, what’s a website for? Sharing.

For me, sharing the joy of discovery, spreading the word about all the beauty in the world that you can embrace, too.

Thanks to those of you who’ve followed along all these years.

Travel provides perspective. Here’s a story on some unique ones in North Carolina.

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PS. I’m genuinely weary from the swirl of existential angst (and my own anger) over state-sanctioned brutality and murder and lies. I honor and respect and am humbled by those who raise their voices high and gather en masse to protest. I am frustrated by my limitations of what I myself can do, for stress impacts my health badly.

Stress is the flip side of joy. Reading this recently, it’s a comfort to know I’m not alone.

Calling All Highly Sensitive Types