10th day at WA Progress Report

byFoobard

565 followers

7 years ago

It's hard to believe I've only been here for 10 days! I completed the first course, and started the second. I built two websites, one is just a shell, and I'm not sure if I want to proceed with that one. It's got a great name but I'm not sure how I could monetize it. Originally I was going to use it as a portfolio and platform to market my Powershell scripting and automation skills to make money freelancing. Now I think the market may be too narrow. I think I should switch to offering my skills as a WordPress freelancer to help people fix or build websites. I have already had to hack a purchased plugin and a couple themes to make them work. That was fun digging into the code and fixing it and optimizing it for my needs.

My second website, the "fun" one, is coming along nicely. I've set up the structure and wrote several pages of content in MS Word. It doesn't look like much yet, because the content is still in Word, and not on my website! There were some annoying things in my theme (I hate italics!), and serif fonts, and some font sizes were too small for easy reading, so I dug into fixing them with CSS. I started off with a search on WA, got some tips, then I tried a couple plugins that you can use to find out the regions to modify. Those plugins were severely gimped in the free version, but they were good enough to point to the sections I needed to change. It can be difficult to know what to change. I have hand-coded websites with CSS before, but since I built them, I knew exactly what to change. Going through someone else's code can be difficult at first, but it is a fun challenge. I did a bit of googling, and I found the Google Chrome Dev Tools are built into the Chrome browser. So I pulled up my site, activated the Dev Tools by <CTRL><SHIFT><I>, and I was able to <I>nspect the various regions to find what I needed to change.

I added them to my Additional CSS file, (each theme calls it differently) and I was able to get rid of ugly serif fonts, ugly italics, and make my fonts bigger! And the Dev Tools can prototype what your site looks like on mobile, so I checked that out, too. It's a super powerful tool, and there's even training for it. I'm only scratching the surface so far. It is a bit daunting when you first use it, though.

I estimate I have been spending between 7 and 12 hours a day between writing content, futzing with my site structure, and doing stuff with WA.

I am limited in the WA training, because my content is in Word, not on my site! Today I will post what content I have, it doesn't have to be perfect. Then I can progress further with the training.

Also, one last thing, I was reading up on new WA features in development, and I learned that they are thinking of creating a freelancer marketplace! That would be great for me, so I can make some immediate cash while I build out my sites and try to build passive income. In the meantime, I will work on my Upwork profile, and strongly consider moving out of the Powershell Automation niche and into Wordpress support and eventually plugin development.