I recently experienced a very ‘doh’ moment when I finally solved a problem that I had been having for weeks. I have several websites that I’ve built and manage on my own. One of the most recent sites is with a hosting service I normally use only for email. Don’t get me wrong. This service is as good or better than most. I simply haven’t needed a website at the domain parked there until now.

Normally (on my other hosting services) when I customize a WordPress Theme in order to make the website more attractive) there is a blue button labeled ‘publish’ at the top of the appearance/customize menu. The hosting service I’m using has that button too. However, my experience with other hosing services was that the button said ‘publish.’ to save and publish any changes, I clicked on that button.

As I made changes in my new website, I would click that button, and the changes were saved. But for some unknown reason (I’m sure you’ve figured it out by now) the changes never showed when I went to view my website and its pages in a browser.

I kept plugging away at constructing (or drafting if you will) the new website. After a week or so I was ready to go live. Plugins were set up correctly. The site was customized correctly. All my links worked. Why the heck couldn’t I see the custom changes when viewed in a browser? What to do?

Well first I sought help from tech experts both at the hosting service and a few I know personally. They, like me, believed I had followed all instructions and done everything right but they could not find the problem either. Desperate, I used an old authors’s trick (no not the trick of old authors but an old trick of authors). I took my hands OFF the keyboard, sat back in my chair as comfortably as possible, and stared at the screen until my eyes crossed then uncrossed. I don’t know what other folks call this technique. I call it “seeing differently.”

And boy, did I see that website differently. What I saw was that the blue button at the top of the appearance/customize menu did not have the word ‘publish’ written within as I had thought. The word written there was ‘draft’ (cliched, I know, but the light was beginning to dawn). Then I finally noticed, right next to the word ‘draft’ and inside the blue button, the little gear symbol (you know the one just about every app, program, etc. uses to represent settings). I was seeing in broad, almost blinding, daylight–metaphorically speaking.

I clicked on the gear, and low and behold, a drop down menu appeared. ‘Publish’ was one of the options on the drop down. The danged blue button wasn’t just for saving. Like the blue buttons, I’d seen on my other websites, it was there to help me publish. The toggle was there to keep me from publishing before I was ready. er hosting services have other means to achieve the same preventive function. I simply had not encountered this one before.

The solution to my customize appearance problem had been right before my eyes all the time. Doh!

I must confess that this blue button problem isn’t the first time I’ve needed to ‘see differently’ in order to spot a solution to issues that arose while drafting this new website. A couple of times now, I’ve found solutions to problems by using that old technique of authors, long after I got frustrated and went to work on other things. (I’d wager that authors aren’t the only professionals who use this and other ‘seeing differently’ techniques.)

Nonetheless, once I spotted the problem, I had that ‘doh,’ I should have known better. Why? Well, I’m an author, and a major issue for almost every author is self-editing. We (like witnesses to a crime) often see what we think we wrote, what we believe we saw, whether it was really there or not.

As an author, I work with a really, really good editor. I’m always amazed at the things she finds that I knew in my soul were in the polished draft I sent her only to discover that my soul was wrong. That’s why I work with her.

Some people call the problem I have with seeing what’s in front of my face ‘tunnel vision.’ ‘Tunnel vision’ is a problem because you don’t know you’re inside the tunnel until after you’re outside. Thank heaven for great editors. They are the true light in an author’s soul.