Practice Sites?

Hey Wascally,

I understand your pain. I just got finished setting up my own new blog and getting it to look the way I wanted it to was like beating my head up against the wall for hours upon hours.

I learned my lesson fast. I would quickly outsource this type of thing in the future (this includes video editing as of yesterday as well!)

But if you're on a budget or you just like to experiment like I do, you can simply install another blog in a separate folder on your domain. Like websitecom/test-blog/ or something.

Just install the same theme and play around with it in there. Then when you get it the way you want it, you just have to copy and paste the files into your main theme.

This way you avoid div's that float in the wrong direction and ruin the entire look of your page in an instant just by changing the width 20 pixels one direction or the other!

The pain! The horror!

Marc

PS. Definitely add a robots.txt file to your test blog directory and disallow all. This way search engines won't index it and it won't affect the SEO of your main blog. Just Google robots.txt.

Don't worry about it.

Just publish your content and it will be fine.

If you break something you can always fix it. Just make sure to keep back ups of the stuff you publish and if possible try to keep notes of what you changed.

But even if you are like most people (too lazy to make backups or keep notes) nothing really bad can happen. Worst case: you lose a few visitors because they were annoyed with you latest test.

Just write content and publish it and you will be fine.

I'm with hpgoodboy- start publishing content and getting traffic- then make small updates every day.

You'll be more encouraged to keep going if you are getting some results, rather than trying to perfect your WP layout.

Don't aim for perfection- "good enough is good enough"!

...except for civil engineers or surgeons.

These guys make good points. On the one hand as soon as you start earning income from your blog, you'll know it "works" and you'll be less inclined to change anything.

And when you do, you'll have the funds to outsource it.

I definitely resonate with your wanting it to look good though.

TheEye is right on the money. Put the version you got right now, out there. Get it LIVE. But what he said reminded me of this video of Bill O'Reily:


Newscaster's got bad language! Profanity! So watch out.

Marc