I’ve had three years on bluehost, with a start of a site made. I’ve been posting regularly on instagram for nearly a year and am very slowly growing an audience. As in, 228 followers and 27 people on my email list (a couple of which are spam, but I haven’t yet figured out how to delete them). Oh yes, rocking the world. But, hey, it’s a start.
I’ve not really known where I’m going with it, tbh. I think I can write fairly well (improvement to be made, for sure, but there’s a base I’m happy with). Focusing in on a niche? Not so much. I feel like I have experience that it could be useful to share. Lots of post ideas pop up – time to write them is more limited. IG captions are easier, but they still don’t fit into a neat little ‘this is what I do’ bucket.
Still, learning by doing is helping, and currently I reckon my sweet spot of experience and skills is going to lie in flexible home ed planning and record keeping. I think I could write a pretty decent app that lets you plan your home ed life without getting too sucked in to fixed curriculum boxes, and gives you something to look back on to generate an LA report or just convince yourself that you really are actually doing something and it’s all OK. I _just_ need to learn web development first (next post).
Meanwhile, I want to keep up the blog and it’s general meanderings. And this little site can be a bit of a playground to figure out stuff before it gets on to the main one.
So far:
I’ve just moved domain name hosting onto GoDaddy, and we hosting onto SiteGround, on their GrowBig plan which gave me space to add multiple websites and therefore play around with this one. I’m liking both the interfaces so far – nice and easy to see what’s going on.
I used the SiteGround tool to set this up as a new website – picked one of the themes it suggested for a Personal Blog (Ocean something-or-other), and added a selection of plugins it suggested and/or I wanted to try out. I suspect I’ll play around with the theme later, but I just don’t care for now. Also, it has Elementor builtin, which I probably need to start playing with (this is just done in plain old Gutenberg, the main WordPress editor, type and go).
The Plugins I remember were Jetpack (site stats), Monster Insights (connects to Google Analytics – I haven’t got the hang of this yet and I probably need to for my main site), WPForms for a contact list (hey, why not?), yoast for SEO (not that I even really _want_ this to rank, but again, it’s a useful tool to play with – I have it on the other site but not really used it much). And, um, probably some other stuff. It just all looked good.
Also it has the SG Optimizer plugin which should sort out some stuff for me on the hosting side. So far I’ve installed SSL (for free, but had to go through the process to do it on the SiteGround panel). Looks like there’s some other stuff I should be looking at too.
But first, breakfast for all, and a day of doing the actual priority stuff of life (educating the kids and what not – or at least, since this is prep week, figuring out how on earth I’m going to do that next year).