A Valuable Wealthy Affiliate Life Lesson Learnt Today - Don't Run Before You Can Walk
For the first time in my first couple of months at Wealthy Affiliate, I learn't a valuable lesson today and that lesson was Don't run before you can walk!
As I continue to work myself through level 3 of the excellent training programme on offer here at Wealthy Affiliate, my newly found limited technical knowledge and over confidence had led me to believe that I wasn't happy my current theme for my website.
Following valuable feedback from fellow Wealthy Affiliate members, I had set about trying to preview my posts on my homepage instead of having all my posts fully open and available to read which looked like a never ending story. Having carried out some research through my dashboard and dabbled through my settings I hadn't had any success in previewing my posts.
Therefore, having completed another section of training, I decided now was the time to take some decisive action and change my theme, what could go wrong.....................
Well as it happens and as I learnt, quite a lot can go wrong and it can be very time-consuming retrieving everything, if your lucky. Having spent a couple of hours admiring many website themes of which each one seemed to be more technologically advanced than the last, I eventually settled on one.
On the face of it looked fantastic, scrolling pages and articles with more headings than I could dream of. It even came with additional recommended plug ins which as a novice I only too readily took advantage of. I was started to feel like I was uncovering a Russian Doll as the next page I opened offered me a more advanced theme than the one I initially chose, so what did I do.
You guessed it, I chose a more advanced theme and this is where I started to notice it was all going wrong. As like a swimmer who has just dispensed with their armbands and naively swims to the deep end only to find themselves out of their depth, I suddenly noticed I was out of my depth and the following had happened:
- My Home Page was blank
- Posts were no longer under headings at the top of the website
- My page had suddenly had fashion related content (I have a travel related website)
- I had about 20 extra headings at the top of my website
At this point I thought I had destroyed a couple of months work with just a few clicks of a button however after a couple of hours frantic searching around the back end of my website, I managed to retrieve all my content, eradicate all the additional content which had arrived on my site and reverted back to a much simpler website.
Most importantly a lesson had been learnt as I return to concentrate on my training........... Don't run before you can walk!!!
Recent Comments
5
Hi RmLeaver,
Never think your experience changing your theme was a waste of time. I believe you have learnt a lot through that exercise. At least I did. :) It's normal that once you changed your theme, all the configuration will revert to the default of the new theme. You only need to make some adjustment to get it back to normal.
All the best.
Joe
Thanks for the advice Joe. I agree that I definitely learnt from the experience and became more accustomed with certain elements of my website.
This is so true. Many a time we want to go ahead with something that hasn't been validated as part of a training plan only to find ourselves in a state.
It happens to the best of us.
Sometimes these things work out sometimes they don't.
However, I wouldn't look at it as a failure - a setback maybe - as I'm sure you've learnt a lot about the backend of Wordpress and what to do and not do in future.
Wishing you success as you return to where you left off in the training!
Thank you Jackie, yes a definite lesson has been learn’t to slow down and to progress at one step at a time.
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Great lesson indeed
Simple in the beginning
Thank you for sharing