Yesterday, I decided to change the Home Page on the Lifelong Learners GTX website. There are a couple reasons for this, but the main one is that I needed a space to acknowledge people and organizations that generously support us. I needed to create two boxes. Or containers, or whatever they are.
I do almost all of the work on the website myself to save us money. Yes, I take about four times as long as someone who isn’t trying to save us money, but don’t worry, many of my hours doing such things are volunteer hours because, you know, I’m learning as I go. Or not learning as I go.
Our website has an app called Elementor Pro. If you look them up online, you will read that “Elementor Pro is an extension of Elementor, which empowers you with vast professional tools that speed up your workflow and design.” Huh.
If you ask me, Elementor Pro is a tool of the dark forces that motivates even people of deep faith to curse and swear and wonder if there is a god after all. You don’t want to be around me when I’m using it. And losing it.
All I needed to do was create two boxes and fill them in. After three or four hours of working on it, all I had left to do was to create two boxes and fill them in.
Even with the help of Google and YouTube and all the saints, I could not get those two boxes formatted and filled in correctly, having lost all of my work twice along the way. Mind you, it’s not all that bad to lose bad work, but it’s still disheartening.
I think we should always be learning new things. Old dogs, new tricks. So I kept plugging away until my eyes glazed over and my mind went numb. I wrapped up my day with a pathetic-looking home page and a firm commitment to never, ever, ever use such an elementary app as Elementor Pro again.
Oh, and I also ended the day asking my web guru in Nepal if he was familiar with Elementor Pro. Of course he was asleep at the time. Lucky him.
This morning I saw his answer: “Yes.” So I took a screamshot and WhatsApp’ed him my problem. He responded almost immediately with his own screenshot that was filled with red arrows showing me what I had done wrong and asking me what I wanted him to do.
Sudarshan is the nicest guy around, and endlessly, patiently helpful. Still, I wanted to yell at him in all caps, “WHAT DO I WANT YOU TO DO? I WANT YOU TO FIX IT.” Instead, I was remarkably calm. “Please correct what I’ve done and….”
He fixed it. It took him 30minutes. The Home Page looks so much better. You can see and appreciate those who help us out financially.
So what did I learn? 1) That I don’t know how to use Elementor Pro’s vast professional tools that speed up my workflow. Quite the contrary. 2) I should contact Sudarshan after the first 3 minutes instead of the first 3 hours. 3) Lifelong learning can be a miserable experience. 4) Miserable experiences sometimes offer us the most memorable lessons no matter how hard we try to forget them.
Now back to YouTube. I’m going to master this if it’s the last thing I do. I’m pretty sure it will be.