Ever mindful of “where am I going with this” as a pro blogger my first week has seen the site setup. The first blogs are posted, and quite a bit of learning about blogs generally and WordPress. I keep researching how this could benefit my franchise consultancy firm, Lime Licensing Group. I’ve got a few good ideas which I’m working on for a later blog.
A well known pro blogger said I should set up Adsense on the site. That way as and when any one actually reads my stuff I might get some money from it. I should apparently also look into subscriptions. For that I will need a reason to subscribe. However one thing at a time. I decided to go forAdsense first. It’s quite easy to set up actually even for a novice like me. Google take a few days to confirm it all but then you’ve got the familiar adverts running. That’s where the problems start!
Plugin problems
What I wasn’t quite ready for was the variety of ads that Adsense shows. Also how tricky the plugins are to get control of where the ads appear. I’ve spent quite a few hours faffing about and I’m not at all sure I like it. I’ll run with it for a while and see what happens. Oddly I found that one of the plugins I installed plucked old content from a previous web theme from some time ago. I used a car garage theme at first and one or two posts about tyre changing appeared from nowhere! This web design malarkey seems a constant job tidying things up!! Using FTP you can delve around and delete things that shouldn’t be there. You then have to make sure you havent got links to nowhere. One thing leads to another …
I changed the website theme from a green to a red and bought a “pro theme” from an Indian developer. The theme I am using is called Spicepress Pro. I struggled a lot with understanding how to upgrade from the free theme to the pro theme. It’s not novice friendly stuff Im dealign with here, but then the who point is to learn a new skill! I ended up locking myself out of WordPress and crashing the entire site! I don’t think that a Pro Blogger would do that. Hastily I got in through FTP, deleted the entire theme, reinstalled it and the site reappeared! But I was still on the free theme. Thankfully the developer said he’d log in and do it for me. No sooner as he was ready then miraculously the pro theme appeared all by itself! Maybe it was a cache issue.
The pro theme is now up and I’m learning the ropes with that.
Broken Links
I also installed a broken link plugin which does what it says on the tin, and now I have a load of links to fix! I’ve noticed if you use WordPress theme changer it often causes link problems so it’s best to choose your theme and then just go with that I think! I’ve found that sometimes my broken link checker says a link is broken even though it works fine. Driving me nuts! But I’m plodding along building the site and learning as I go. For some weird reason Im enjoying learning something new that will benefit my main business!
Hopefully by mid Jan it’ll look like a professional site!!