Selling on the Web for YOU!

Who knew that setting up a web page could be such a task? I thought I had the three main components, a domain name, a hosting account and content. The “experts” all agree that when setting up a web page, good design is important but good content is essential. I thought I had good content but I had no idea…

What I found out was that the very act of setting up a web page (or in my case a blog) gave me more content than I could shake a stick at. I’m a programmer, I’ve been writing computer programs for over 40 years. I’ve known how to set up a web page, in fact how to design and implement whole e-commerce web sites for 15 years and yet, this blog thing felt strange to me. I had used Quick Blogcast from GoDaddy but when I took on a real job after being self-employed for the previous 25+ years, I didn’t want to spend my evenings in front of a computer so I gave it up.

Now I’m “semi-retired”, have the time and that desire older people get to “share” their experience so I decided to set up a blog again. I didn’t hear many people talking about Quick Blogcast and really didn’t want to pay another monthly fee so I set out to find a new platform. After some research and at the urging of a friend and client, I decided that WordPress was the way to go and since I already had a hosting account, opted for the self-hosted version.

After all these years, I was half way home to setting up my very own Web Page where I could, impart wisdom, rant, help people, bring attention to my wife’s vintage jewelry (www.SoDear2MyHeart.com), and maybe even sell a web site or two.

Or so I thought:

• My first obstacle was that I chose a theme that didn’t have some of the normal widget and menu stuff.
• My second obstacle was that I didn’t know how to do .php scripts and I am using Dreamweaver CS4, not the new Dreamweaver CS5 that helps you with those. (No you don’t need Dreamweaver to write a blog but I wanted to use it to help make the blog appear “seamless” with the rest of my site.)
• My third obstacle was that I went to a public library and got a (computer) virus which took me 24 hours to get over. After removing 1,700 infected files, I had to re-install Dreamweaver and several other programs.
• Next, I gave up on my nifty design that matched the rest of my web pages and went with “The Morning After” since it had a “newsy” look and feel and appeared to have more widgets, menus, and columns for widgets. I would deal with the huge difference in the appearance of the two designs later.
• Then (here’s the stupid part) I decided that I didn’t want my readers going to my web page and seeing that they were at www.webselling4u.com/wordpress but rather at blog.webselling4u.com. I had already set up blog.webselling4u.com as a subdomain. So I went to my WordPress options page and changed the domain names to blog.webselling4u.com… well not exactly… I change them to blog.websellign4u.com (notice the g and n are swapped). I’ve had this domain for years now… If I can’t spell it who can. At 3:00 this morning I gave up and called GoDaddy. They were GREAT and eventually found the misspelling. Turns out what I did would have worked with the new 3.1.1 version of WordPress if I had just known how to spell my own domain name.

So here I am. I’ve conquered setting up a web page. I have more content than I wanted. And, I have new challenges to come. Maybe I will get that Dreamweaver CS5 upgrade soon so I will have a clue what’s going on when I look at the .php code next.