Steep Learning Curve - Starting Over!
Interesting couple of days.
I bit off way more than I could chew with my new niche, with the building of a new membership site.
Being 'fearless and brave' (silly?), I downloaded 'WPAdverts' and the 'All Extensions Bundle' and installed everything on my brand new shiny wordpress site - which I'd previously set up with a sexy new responsive theme.
Then I 'boldly' installed every single plugin in the 'all extensions bundle' along with the WA recommended SEO & EWWW plugins... oh and I threw in a couple more for good measure (WPForms, and added my site security certificate on for good measure). All in all I had about 20 plugins installed and activated.
After all, a girl can never have too many shoes plugins right?
After spending the best part of 2 days getting everything LOOKING as it should be, nice content on, and configuration of categories, locations etc etc for adverts, I decided to test the user flow process to see how my intended audience might go about creating an account and updating their information.
But.... Nothing behaved as it should! Panic stations!!!
It was then I thought I'd better refer to the instructions!!! (aka plugin documentation).
And what, do you think those all important instructions revealed?
- The sexy theme I installed was not compatible with the intended purpose of my site :-(
- Just because a plugin is included in the 'All Extensions Bundle' does not mean you're going to necessarily need to use it. In fact some of the plugins counteracted others, basically confusing the $h1t out of my website.
- But to top it all off, there were other plugins I should have installed first, before going hell for leather and installing all the little addons (Woocommerce! duh!)
Where to from here?
It became clearly apparent that I'd done everything back to front, so I've actually started completely from scratch, using one of my free siterubix domains, and FOLLOWING THE INSTRUCTIONS.
Surprise surprise, everything is working like a dream.
I'm going to delete the original website and move my siterubix one across to replace it once I'm sure it's all behaving as it should.
On the plus side - I'm learning heaps!
Lessons for the day...
- Read the instructions!
- SiteSupport can only help so much... but there is an invisible line, and I think I probably crossed it; (I definitely got my money's worth this month - sorry guys&gals)
- Too much of a good thing (plugins in this case) can be bad for you
- Utilise the free siterubix domains to test ideas and concepts
Onwards and upwards,
Cheers, Karen :)
Recent Comments
24
Good afternoon Karen,
This is a horror story! Happy you got it sorted out even if it was the hard way. I have only 4 plugins and for months have been battling with site speed which is not good. Oh well, never a dull moment.
Greetings from the south of Spain, Taetske
Ooh Karen... I feel for you! Nothing like doing it all back to front to really get the learning though, hey? I've done this more times than I care to remember. ;) Steep learning curve but hey, whatever works! Failing forward by John Maxwell comes to mind.
As long as we learn something and no one was harmed in the process, Right? :) my confidence took a bit of a battering though, but it's great to have it working now.
Yip, lots to be learned - especially for non geeks - thank goodness for site support and the community here!
See more comments
Thank you for having the courage to share this part of your journey. It teaches all of us to go slow in this learning process and that sometimes less is just....better. :)
Agreed. It also shows that just because plugin suppliers provide a bundle of extras.... that they don't necessarily all fit together. A trick for WordPress newbs like me!