Three months later, I am ready for a new start

byMio143

59 followers

8 years ago

My First Web Site

About three months ago I created my first web site named zootclub.com.

Now that the site is completed, I took a time to review my achievements and mistakes.

In my opinion, the web site design and technical implementation are about average. Graphic design is probably just slightly above average. The content is reasonably informative and with sufficient illustrations. Within a week from creating the web site, it has been indexed by Google.That's all fine, but ...

The major issue turned out to be the fact that my site is not attracting visitors.

It was my decision not to promote the web site via social media and private connections. I was interested to see how effective would be my keywords in attracting the visitors based exclusively on search engine rankings.

I used Google Analytics to monitor the traffic, but there were no clicks.

During the development process I had a suspicion that this might turn out to be the case. The reason was obvious: the site was developed for myself, not with other people in mind, almost completely ignoring visitors' needs. Another conclusion is that the site presents an eclectic collection of my personal interests such as: bohemian lifestyle, conceptual art, short story writing, healthy food, recipes, tennis motivation, books and funny images and videos that I came across.Too complicated and confusing.

In the context of Affiliate Marketing, this is a good example of taking a wrong approach. Having said that, my time has not been completely wasted.

I learned various development techniques and features of WordPress. In addition, I improved my understanding of the way marketing works, or in my case does not work.

Listed below is a brief summary of what I learned and applied in my development:

1. First, I turned SiteSSL (HTTPS) and SiteSpeed on.
2. During the initial phase I created and uploaded my site’s logo and favicon.
3. Then added and activated the following plugins:

• A Backup plugin (UpdraftPlus - Backup/Restore). I take manual weekly backups, then copy backup files to my c-drive with FileZilla. In addition, I copy the folders (both httpdocs and httpsdocs) from the server to my c-drive (which takes a bit of time) and export posts and pages in xml format using WordPress Tools >> Export utility.

• A plugin for creating a Child-Theme.

• A plugin to displays Google Analytics Reports and Real-Time Statistics in my Dashboard.

• A plugin to hide the title tag on single posts/pages.

• A utility for fixing the position of selected widgets when the page is scrolled down (Q2W3 Fixed Widget plugin).

• A plugin to Open external links in a new window.

• A plugin for adding like (thumbs up) and unlike (thumbs down) functionality for posts/pages.

• A plugin to add a floating scroll-to-top button to posts/pages.

• A plugin that provides a simple and easy way to add custom sidebars/widget-areas to posts/pages.

• A Content Views plugin, which enables to display posts/pages in different layouts (grid, scrollable list, collapsible list).

• A plugin that enables displaying Category-Posts in Custom Menu. This plugin replaces selected Category-links / Post-Tag-links / Custom-taxonomy-links in a Custom Menu by a list of their posts/pages.

• Changed default fonts and reduced some of the font sizes.
• Removed site credit from the Footer.
• Modified links (visited and active) colours.
• In menu-navigation section, replaced "vertical bar" with spaces.
• In menu-navigation section - changed colours of selected, displayed and hovered items and sub-items.
• In content's entry-meta section - suppressed author info from being displayed.

5. My only achievement on the marketing side was:

• to sign up with three affiliate programs and successfully implemented their links.

Finally, here is the plan for my next project:

The niche I am going to choose will provide the focus for my web site content.

• This time I will try to be more careful when choosing my niche. I am looking for a single field of interest, an area that will address people’s needs hopefully generate a high demand and interest. Right now, I am on a mission to find out what people need that I can provide.

Keywords are the magic phrases that translate into high ratings and attract the traffic.

• This time I will put more effort in planning the project. The core requirement are the keywords and catchy phrases. At this stage, I believe that I understand what and how needs to be done and I need to make it happen. My aim is to get a structured set of keywords that would guide me through content development.