I spend my days here at LeapFrog building websites but I spend the rest of the time building my own site—my new house.  Aside from “hackin’ d’code� as I like to put it, my life is all about building my family’s new home.  Every day after I leave work, I head on over to the house we’re building.  This has been my nightly routine for the past year.

We’ve been doing just about everything for the construction of my new home sweet home.  My hubby’s a licensed electrician so aside from hiring some framers and some people to lay the concrete, it has been all us.  We do have an unpaid adviser—one of our friends has built several houses on his own, and he’s been coming by and helping us out from time to time.

Despite the hard work, the experience has been a neat one, and it really brings out the tomboy in me.  I’ve done everything from helping run the electrical to being up in the rafters running wire to putting down flooring and painting and running the HVAC.

I’ve kept an online diary of the whole experience for my friends and family to see how things have progressed.  We’re almost there but we still can’t live in it.  Where I live, before you can move in, you have to get a permit and have an inspector come out and approve the house as being safe for occupancy.

I’m really, really looking forward to the day when we can move in and the house is finished.  It’s been a lot of fun but it’s also deprived me of a lot of sleep.  We get home from the site each night and feed, bathe, and get our kids in bed.  So by the time I get something to eat and finally go to sleep, it’s nearly midnight and I’ll have to get up the next day at 5:30 and start the whole thing all over again.

So you can imagine how happy I’ll be when the only site work that I need to worry about will be for client websites.

With all the resources out there that can help someone put together a DIY website, it might be tempting to consider having your website built by someone other than a professional, like a freelancer or even your really bright 15-year-old cousin. All these available resources do make it easier to create a decent-looking website. The problem is that while taking this route can give you a website, it won’t give you a protected one, and if something goes wrong and there is a security issue, you won’t have avenues for support.

Security is a serious shortcoming inherent in homemade websites. Someone who puts together an e-commerce site without a thorough knowledge of all the security measures needed to properly lock down the site leaves it (and its customer credit card information) very vulnerable. How vulnerable? A client of mine hired a freelancer to do his e-commerce website. In about 10 minutes, I was able to hack into the site and get all the credit card information stored on it. This was really not good because I am by no means a hacker.

Security has become a much deeper issue for all sites. Hackers can steal your URL, recode your website, start sending out viruses using your website, and steal your identity information. They are very crafty and will have no problem getting whatever they want from and doing whatever they want to an unprotected or improperly protected website. (more…)