My first idea was to build Ho Springs in wordpress, which I’d used to create How Not To Act Old and which I worked on every day at nameberry.  I knew wordpress, I liked wordpress, and probably best of all, wordpress was fast, free, and easy.

Well, easy theoretically, that is, if you can find a theme (that’s a template or design) that jibes with what you want to create.  Given my vision for Ho Springs, that very quickly proved to be a challenge.  I couldn’t find a ready-made theme that incorporated video and picture icons with a central blog that also had a design I liked.

So I started emailing theme designers and asking if they could adapt or build a theme just for me.  Most didn’t respond; those that did either didn’t have time or were too expensive.

Ditto with designers I knew.  I didn’t even bother to ask the brilliant and wonderful Jeff Rabb, who created nameberry: as much as I’d love to work with him again, I couldn’t afford him and didn’t want to make him feel like he had to do me a favor.  Likewise J.P. Welch, who created the mewsie site for my Montclair Editors & Writers group for free and also remade the How Not To Act Old site after the book came out.

Besides the fact that I had no money, I’d been spending a lot of time the past few years creating wonderful projects for free and I couldn’t justify spending much on yet another creative flyer.  Plus, I knew what I wanted the site to look like and didn’t really need to pay for a top-to-toe design.

Or so I foolishly believed.  I asked my friend, the composer Dennis Tobenski, whom I’d met a few years ago at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (we collaborated on a deathless torch song called “I Want You To Kiss The Back of My Neck”), if he would put together a site for me based on my own design, for an absurdly low amount of money.  Dennis, plied with burgers and beer, agreed.  But before we could put together the site, he said, we’d need the logo.

This is the difference between being a designer and being a person with semi-good taste.  It had never occurred to me that we needed to start with the logo.  Couldn’t we just design the site and make the logo fit the design?  No, Dennis said firmly.  The logo set the tone and I needed to figure that out before we built around it.

Lucky me, I knew what I wanted my logo to look like.  Flaming letters, was my vision, with the T in Hot Springs up in smoke, or steam, or something symbolic.

But, like every other detail of the site, I soon discovered that creating my flaming logo was anything but simple.  I needed a photoshop expert, and after, ahem, burning through a few who couldn’t set the letters on fire, I encountered one who could….for $1500.

That’s when I turned to Katie Mancine, who did a lot of design work for my friend Debbie Galant’s hyperlocal news site baristanet.  Katie promised to create my logo for the very reasonable price of $300.  And, after a month of work, she did.  I was thrilled.  Here it is:

The only problem was, no matter what Dennis and I did to build the website around this stupendous logo, it looked like shit.  Finally, right before Christmas, I turned in desperation back to Katie.  I needed her design help to create the rest of the site.

She’d love to work on it, she told me.  The only problem was that she thought I needed to scrap the logo and start from scratch.

Next: If There’s A Fire in Hot Springs, Is There Smoke in Ho Springs?