I won’t hide behind the fact that I was formally given the job by Toimintaterapia PR. The small clinic is my mother's. (She is an occupational therapist.) And the job interview, as I recall it, went more or less like this:

“Do you know someone who does web pages?”

“No, but I could.”

And so I ended up creating the new website for my mother’s small clinic.

She had a site already. But she wanted some updates and I know next to nothing of coding. And her previous pages were from an era before my birth. So I promised I could make her new pages, instead of trying to open the code of the old ones.

There were people that had done websites. I had opened some website editors before in my efforts, in vain, to try and get inspired to create a portfolio for myself. So I knew, for a fact, that laying out the foundations for a fully functional site doesn’t require superhuman abilities.

Turns out there is more involved than I had predicted. (Very surprisingly)

The design part was simple enough. I had her old pages to work with, and we found all of the old images she wanted on the new ones, including the logo. I wasn’t expected to change anything big. Just add a few images and pages.

So. I had these beautiful pages soon done and packed. And as I had been doing them in Wix (a website creator), I was now ready to hit the publish button.

And then started the learning. Because the pages weren’t visible on Google, or any other search engine. (Before this I really thought Google knew everything I was up to. I was wrong.) SEO, search engine optimization, was a new term for me. And opened my world anew.

Of course most of us are kind of familiar with the bare bones of the process I was facing next, since most have a social media account somewhere that uses tags or hashtags or keywords. But I was suddenly faced with the immense task of keywording everything under the domain of Toimintaterapiapr.net. (domain and hosting were also words I learned during the process.)

(Editor note from 2023: My mother retired a few years after and the thus the website cannot be found any more)

Because of the visibility issue, I also got familiarized with Google Ads and how to manage those.

I think the whole process was an eye-opening experience. It somehow reminded me that the internet is, after all, made up by humans. Mostly by people no smarter than myself. (Though there are some very smart ones out there as well)

I am still learning of this little ocean called the internet every day. It can be a confusing place. And Search Engine Optimization has fascinated me ever since this little adventure. I feel like it’s a skill comparable to knowing a language, a changing, evolving being with many uses.