Author: George Morris

Welcome back! This is the second part in our series starting from HERE. In our last article, we covered the value of using WordPress for your website, as well as where to get business-class hosting. This time, we cover the task of installing wordpress, and picking themes and plugins! WordPress Installation Installing WordPress varies from host to host, but at Nuova Webs (and many others), a tool called “Softaculous” is used to install it. Some hosts offer WordPress installation right out of the box as well. I won’t cover the procedure so as to avoid confusing folks on a different host, but you can check with your host’s support or knowledge base for specific instructions. Plan Your Website! Stop and Read! So you have WordPress installed, or you are at least about to. I hope by now you’ve thought about what you want your site to look like and do. Things to think about: Color scheme you want. Colors are important and speak all on their own! Subject matter. Very important to know what you want to write about! Competitor sites that have design elements you like or don’t like. Any particular visions you have for how you want it to look. Keywords you want to rank in search engines for. Here’s where DIY is a pain- if you’re not particularly experienced in building sites, you may not get...

WordPress is an amazing platform and CMS for building a plethora of websites. Originally built for blogs, it has since expanded to be quite the “do everything” CMS. Its theme and plugin system has allowed it to become the most versatile and easy to use way to build a website. WordPress.org is the free, open source version, and WordPress.com is a commercial hosted solution by Automattic. We will be working with the self-hosted WordPress.org system. Many people pick up how to use it by pointing and clicking, but others struggle with it.  The good news is, DIY website building is totally in right now, and here is why the WordPress platform is the best, especially if you’re starting out: Professionals do not use DIY builders such as Wix, Weebly, Webeasy, etc. If you are looking for an easy jumpstart on your site, be aware that anyone who takes their web career seriously won’t use this kind of tool. This puts a damper on when you do want to expand, because you’ll have to have the whole website redesigned from scratch. You don’t want something you’ll be “stuck” with. Self-hosted WordPress is portable and more flexible! You can move from host to host, and you actually own your data. In fact, going the self-hosted route instead of WordPress.com is best, because you have access to more of the functions of...

When making a difficult choice, let love be your only motivator. Right/wrong logic only leads to results as cold and harsh as logic itself. -George Morris It’s not every day I get a chance to reflect on something so important that affects us all. Difficult choices are a fact of life and everyone must make them. If only life had a training manual then things would be so much easier. Unfortunately, the reason why many difficult choices are so difficult is because the situation is often entirely unique and the answer isn’t clear cut. These choices often lead to very good results or very bad ones. One good piece of advice for this is to make a list of pros and cons. If one side is larger than the other then there is a chance you can decide based on that alone. But not every situation warrants that cold type of logic. We are living, loving beings and we can’t relegate every difficult choice to some simple logic; if we could then we’d be no different than a robot, governed entirely by logic. There was a time when I made decisions almost solely on morals and logic (other times I allowed anger to be my guide). It took me to be led into a bad life situation as a result of this that caused me to wake up and...