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DIY: Creating Your Own Website
I recognize that hiring me to build your website for you is not always feasible. That’s ok. When I was first starting out, I didn’t have a lot of money to blow away on getting a website up. Therefore, I thought I’d put together a checklist for you of what you need to consider if you decide to go it alone. This checklist is assuming that you are going with a self-hosted WordPress site. 1. Domain Name Registration The first thing that you will need to do is register a domain. You can have more than one registered domain name, and likely during the course of your business will have…
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404 Page: Do You Have One?
What the heck is it? Is that what you’re asking? A 404 page, according to Wikipedia is described as The 404 or Not Found error message is a HTTP standard response code indicating that the client was able to communicate with the server, but the server could not find what was requested. Alrighty then. Now in layman’s terms (aka how Janice describes it). Have you ever got back a piece of mail from the post office with “Address Unknown: Return to Sender”? Well, essentially this is the same thing on your site. It happens when someone follows a link that has since been removed from your site, or if they…
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Keyboard Shortcut
Do you get frustrated when you press Enter in the Visual Editor of WordPress and it puts in a larger space than you wanted? I often get the frustrated emails from clients asking me to fix it. I usually just pop in to the HTML area and insert a br code after the line and clean up the p tags and send them on their way. And then I discovered this little short cut. – I think that you’ll fall in love with me 🙂 Instead of pressing the Enter key when you want to drop down to the next line, you press and hold the Shift key first, and…
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Site Maintenance
Are you or Aren’t You Doing This on Your Website? What does that mean to you? Does it mean that you add posts / pages of content? Many of my clients think so. But that’s not the answer. Think about your car. If you were to do maintenance on your car, that means that you periodically have to take your car in for service – to have the oil changed, rotate the tires, check the brakes, inspect the undercarriage, and so on. Maintaining your car does not just mean that you keep putting gas in it and keep going. Well I suppose it could, but at some point, all of…
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The Client Whisperer
Are you a devil client? Or have you had one? Every once in awhile you get the client from hell (or perhaps you’ve been one). You know the ones: can you make the “T” in that sentence bigger? Can you change the colour pink to one shade lighter? Can you move the image to the right 1/16″? Can you …? Can you …? Can you …? Mostly you feel frustrated by what seems to be petty little needs or changes. (Although if not done immediately the entire World will come to a screeching halt if there isn’t a “comma” after that word in that sentence.) Maybe I’m being silly, but if…
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Are you SEOing your blog?
I don’t know about you, but lately it seems that I’ve been getting tonnes of spam mail from concerned individuals that my site is not search engine optimized. Well, perhaps it’s not. And that’s ok. {Shocking eh!} SEO (search engine optimization) has been the buzz-word for internet marketers, and if your website wasn’t SEO then you weren’t making money. Now, don’t get me wrong, we do need to be found in the search engines, however, spending a bazillion dollars of your marketing budget on SEO may line their pockets full of your dough instead of YOUR pockets. Ready to get your website online? Stop trying to do it on your…
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Are Your Feet Moving Backwards?
In April 2010, I attended an event called the Equine Expo, in Columbus, Ohio. At this event, there are many different clinicians and trainers from all over North America offering guidance and advice that have helped them succeed. One clinician in particular, Richard Winters, said something that really struck me. He said, “If your feet are moving backwards, your horse is training you.” Think about that. Whether you have horses, or dogs, or kids – if you are backing up, you are not standing your ground. You are being guided by their actions instead of guiding them by yours. But we’re not really here to talk about training horses, dogs…
