I though a little bit of explanation was in order particularly as this website might radically change overnight.
We’ve always wanted to document the garden and a website seemed a good idea. Then of course when you come to implement the good idea its not as easy as it at first seemed.
I’d hoped to do everything as a simple text edited html website with no frills but with so many pictures no sooner than the first few were uploaded I ran in to problems referencing them.
I tried various editors and finally went with wordpress and the simplest template I could find which is called Variations if you want to try it yourself.
I then spent ages messing with the template to create a site on my home PC (google wordpress and wamp if you want to try that) but the problem was I still hadn’t put anything online.
Finally I decided to bite the bullet and get started live online and live with any mistakes until they get sorted. Therefore you’ll find links that don’t work and bits of template that haven’t been updated. You’ll also have to excuse any little notes you find that I might add to remind me of further work that needs doing. Next on the list is working out how to link to this page from the home page.
Managed to get the links working from the home page but its not very intuitive which means I think it will get overlooked so it will probably get a make over or change to a different menu arrangement at some time.
05/08/2024 We’ve settled for a while now with the WordPress Variations template which is working and I’ve started to add a few more pages to see how they develop. It took some time to get SEOed by Google. Its not difficult but there are a lot of steps and loads of mistakes that can be made. I think I made all of them. However once Google did its stuff and stopped telling me I was doing it all wrong we got the number one position when you search for Ballyvoile. That sorted I’ve tentatively started to add a few more pages. Plant portraits is the newest where I hope to feature what I think are special plants in the garden. Special is very subjective. The first plant gets a mentioned just because it flowered although it also looks pretty good. Then there is the Ballyvoile Links page where I’m putting every useful link I come across that relates to Ballyvoile – if you find any that I’ve not got then let me know at the info address.
23/08/24 Started plant list.