Wealth and Wisdom

Wow, I have to admit my weekend didn’t go as planned. For the last week I’ve been doing some cleanup on our blog. Some of it is installing plugins to help with broken links, to make the blog load quicker, and to help improve our ranking on websites. I also had several minor changes to make before we started pushing this business to the next level. All told my plan was:

• Added plug-ins to help:
  • notify me of broken links
  • Improved cache so the blog loads quicker for my readers.
  • SEO optimization to help improve our search engine position
• Moved my adwords to a more prominant spot. Hopefuly this will help with the click through and generate a bit more revenue. Yes, I know it is so capitolistic of me to mention this but let’s face it…this blog is a business about business!
• category clean-up: We shifted to several key categories. This should help us stay focused and to make it easier for you to find information.
• Shifted our website menu items (Wealth/Life Balance/Entrepreneurship) to the above catagories.
• I developed a favicon. What is a favicon? If you look in the address bar you should see a red/blue yin/yang emblem. That is a favicon. Why did we do it (besides it looks cool)? Because it kept coming up as a missing/broken link!
• Update from WordPress 2.5 to WordPress 2.6.1

All went well until we updated WordPress.

I thought I had it all together and went to show it off to my wife (yes even adults like to puff out their chest to impress women!). I had apparently checked the bolg on an older cached version on Firefox because it all went haywire when we pulled up our site on my wife’s computer.

Long story short…I spent a couple hours trying to fix what shouldn’t have been broken! At the end of the day I put it in as good a condition as possible and walked away. Hands off. Don’t even think about it.

And finally the solution popped into my head. Instead of fighting WordPress I should embrace it and go with the flow. I had made major changes to my theme making it look exactly the way I wanted. In doing this I had to bypass several files and features. Apparently version 2.6 doesn’t like to play this way!

Why it was so complicated

I don’t just run a blog on WordPress. As good a platform as WordPress is for blogging it falls short on the web design front. I built my website using XSitePro (a fantastic web design tool) and made the WordPress blog theme match. All in all it is pretty seamless and allows me the power of WordPress for my blog and the power of XSitePro to build our site. And since it is far easier to make XSitePro look like my blog that is the route I took.

And the added benefit

I had considered going to a wider format (what I have now), but didn’t want to spend hours making it happen. This gives me a cleaner sidebar (on the right hand side). It also allows me to use widgets on the side bar making adjustments and additions much easier.

For those of you who hit our site durring the chaos I appologize. Luckily it happened over the weekend which is typicaly a low trafic time.

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