My Experience So Far With WordPress

Ok…I know it’s been awhile since I last posted on my blog.  The reason for the long gap in posting is embarrassing.   I committed a “newbie” mistake by spending too much time trying to get everything right.  Let me explain.

I started off by following John Thornhill’s suggestion and step-by-step instructions to creating my first blog.  I installed WordPress and the theme he suggested, Flexibility 3 with no problem.  Then I followed his instructions on how to customize the page, such as your header and logo.  That took some time since I needed to create the header image to fit a certain size, which John gave.  Then when it came to my logo…well…I did not have one.  So, I had to go figure out how to do that!

Luckily, I recently purchased an awesome Mac app called Logoist, that will do exactly that very well.  So once I created the logo, then I had to include that on the header and re-upload that again.  So now that I have that part looking good, I kept wondering if there was a better way to do this.  So just like a “newbie”,  I decided to follow John’s friend, Omar Martin’s instructions on how to build a blog and install affiliate links and Adsense.

So, as I start following step-by-step instructions from his My Unfair Advantage members site, the theme Omar used was different.  The reason why is that he designed a theme, called Omarstheme, to make it easy for the newbie to have most of these extras pre-installed.

That was great, except I did not like the look of that theme, and it seemed to not have a very easy interface to make quick changes like Flexibility 3 had.  So after spending a good day trying to make that work, I decided that maybe there was an even better theme available.  I spent some time looking, and let me tell you, there are hundreds if not thousands of WordPress themes available – some were free, but most of the really good ones will cost you.

Then I remembered I just recently purchased OptimizePress!  Well, that was another frustrating experience!  Up until now, I have been building non-Wordpress websites with a program called, Serif Web X6, I think.  Anyhow, it seems building websites with WordPress has been a royal pain in the ass compared to Web X6!  I keep telling myself don’t give up and keep learning how to do this WordPress thing.  Most everyone I hear that works well with WordPress uses OptimizePress for the most flexibility and ease of use, but I guess I will have to spend more time getting used to the interface.

To make a long story short, the plugin version of OptimizePress was not doing what I wanted it to do, so I scrapped that idea and went back to Flexibility 3.  I managed to install a couple of affiliate links and Adsense, so I at least got that far.  I am fairly happy with the look of it for now, and I know over time, it will keep on changing and getting better.

For now, I will be spending more time posting to this blog.  My purpose of doing this is to document what struggles and mistakes I am making in an effort to tame this Internet marketing game and hopefully will be able to generate some decent income from my efforts.

The most critical thing I need to start doing, if I have learned anything from all this, is to focus on one thing and quit chasing after all of the shiny objects!  Think I can do it?  Yeah…I know, that will be tough to do.  In fact, Omar is launching something really cool today.  I just can’t escape!  Darn you marketers!  Quit coming out with great stuff for awhile so I can foooooocuuuuuuussssssss!

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‘Til next time,

Rich Rose