I Get A Little Help From My Friends

When you ask questions in WA, you can learn more than you expected. I'm sure you have had times when you could say, "I get a little help from my friends."

This past week, I've actually gotten a lot of help from this community. Two in particular I'd like to thank publicly.

The first is Marion Black, as she patiently explained several times what I needed to do next. I wish I had her know-how. She didn't give up on me, but answered every question.

I needed to revamp my menu completely, because it was too hard to navigate. A visitor would get confused and overwhelmed and give up in no time. Now it is still not perfect, and I still have some work to do, but I feel it's about 200% better than it was.

I just couldn't figure out how to redo the whole thing. Then Marion suggested I look at Swangirl's site and that put the last piece of the puzzle in place.

Jessica (Swangirl) also willingly answered a couple of questions. Finally, I had a reorganization plan.

I spent Friday going through every post -- all 170 of them -- and in many cases, changed the category to agree with my new plan.

Now it's done. Even my cat felt better last night...at bedtime, he tore around the house, putting

rugs in little piles, before coming to bed. He must have realized that my stress was gone, and that made him feel good, too.

Amazing, how solving a problem can make everything seem better.

Here's a couple of takeaways for you folks. First of all, I advise you, if you want to name your website, use your domain name.

My domain name and website name were different. Google kept referring to my website name, causing some confusion. Marion discovered that my website name was now available as a .com domain, so I grabbed it.

It wasn't available when I began, but now both Google and I are happier.

Consider studying Marion's tutorial called "Menu with Custom Links and Drop Down Non-Clickable Headings." I've watched it now seven or eight times, I think.

Early on, Marion pointed out that when I made my headings in the top navigation bar, I turned my categories into custom links, instead of listing them separately.

Using those categories for headings works fine when your website is quite new. But when it grows, those drop-downs get longer and longer as you add new posts to the category. As Marion says, "If you give people too many choices, they won't choose anything, but will leave your site."

So now I do my categories they way Swangirl does on her site -- They are in a widget in the right sidebar.

From Swangirl's site, I discovered a very cool thing that Word Press does. When you click on a category in that widget list, you get a mini-blog roll of all the posts in that category. How cool is that?

My menu is not perfect. I still need to create a new way to display the "gifts." Making that aspect more understandable might just increase my sales. All in good time.

For the present, I am so happy that the major revamp is done, and I am grateful for all the help I received.

The people in this community are the best and so many of them are very willing to pass on their knowledge to you. We are fortunate to have chosen WA as our venue for building our business.