Maintaining Focus and Flow
Good Morning WA Peeps.
Trust you are all in good health and high spirits. For the last 5/6 days I have been shedding my frustrations, licking my wounds, and getting my mind set to face this challenge I am having with WP and my website. I have gone through most of the training, but some things like editing the look/theme and/or adding widgets or whatever, requires me to review the videos repeatedly. It takes 3 or 5 times for things to come into clarity for me. You know…the AHA! moment.
I am aware of my learning challenges and know it’s important for me to stay organized and to approach each segment slowly, incrementally, and repeatedly. About a two weeks ago I decided to begin improving the look of my site, but quickly came to the realization, I needed to seriously review the tutorials on creating and developing my Word Press site. I went to the class section on WA looking for Kyle’s tutorials and had problems finding them. I found others, but not Kyles. And the other tutorials were referring to widgets and stuff I had not learned yet, which meant I would have to learn how to use these components before addressing my basic need. Too much.
Now a little more info on my learning challenges; if there is a lot of information on the screen I get lost immediately. To give you an idea how visual overload affects me is… I do the grocery shopping for the family. I know exactly where everything is located my grocery store and can zip through the aisle grabbing what I need efficiently and with speed. However, when my grocery, for some insane reason changes the locations of items, I am lost. For me to find anything I must go through each aisle slowly looking at labels, and sometimes will walk past what I am looking for two or three times before I can see it. It’s all a big blur of color and shapes to me. I have a hard time processing a lot of visual information.
Now I have a system when my grocery store changes the locales of what I am looking for…I simply have someone at the store walk me around showing me where the items are now located. But for online learning, I haven’t got a system yet, and this is where I tend to act like a deer in headlights…I freeze, get anxious and that little voice starts whining “this is too hard”.
I have dealt with this little voice before, and it won’t stop me, but I still have not come up with a plan or guide to move forward with improving my website. If anyone can relate to my post and has some concrete operational ideas and/or processes, I would greatly appreciate if you could share your pearls of wisdom.
Cheers!
Terry
Energy Flows Where Attention Goes!
Recent Comments
8
TMI and my eyes glaze...lol. I get it Terry.
Your goal right now is to add content.
Nobody except ourselves, grin, really care about the looks of the site.
As long as I can get from page to page, links open properly, and your content is interesting and/or fun to read, keeps me engaged, etc, then you will get visitors.
Is your website link in your profile area? If so,I will take a look and share some tips on how to get past some of the hurdles you face when making any changes.
Rudy
That's good advice 1Rudy. I'll focus on the content. Meaning...i'll focus on the steak, not the sizzle.
Way to show your honesty and vulnerability as you’re growing through this process, Terry! We’ve all been there.
One thing to keep in mind as you’re just starting off: Focus on the content over the aesthetics.
It’s our human nature to want our website to pop or look like the vision we have in our heads, but the real important factor here is the content.
Even a very basic text based website can convert consistently when the key focus is quality content that answers your target audience’s questions.
If there’s one aesthetic to key in on it would be the simple one of keeping your paragraphs short (1-2 sentences long) allowing plenty of white space.
The navigational aspects are important as well and training jn those areas can be found in the first lessons of the training.
For the rest of your new site, simply keep it simple. That’s a huge way to be way more efficient during these early stages.
Keep up the good work!
Hi Terry
just left a message at your profile. I can appreciate that given your situation at home you need things online to be as clear and simple as possible. whenever you get stuck, reach out and ask for help. If you ask via the Help tab you'll perhaps get too many responses at times! Feel free to reach out to me via PM.if necessary. I may not know all the answers but I suspect I'll be able to find someone who can help if I can't.
:-)
Richard
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Terry this speaks to me and couples with computer illiteracy,it is a nightmare, sometimes I spend the whole day in one place. As a result I am progressing slowly in training.
I found consciously going slow helps with the learning process.