Yesterday I took the plunge and imported this WordPress design onto my new hosting platform. I have been working on the concept for a few months, because I wanted to incorporate my blog into my website, and that was not possible with the old website, which had been designed in 2006. Continue reading
Today is the last in my series of how (not to) design a website in Word Press. We launched the website two motivating minds yesterday and are very excited with the initial response.
Our mission is to deliver high quality coaching tools and services, and to achieve that we really need an opt in button for subscriptions to Two Motivating Minds as it will be very interactive. We will be publishing the dates of our workshops every month, and we are planning to add new coaching tools on a regular basis. We would love to be able to produce a regular newsletter, so having a healthy mailing list of active subscribers is very important.
We needed to add an opt in button so people could subscribe to our website, and I found a great plugin which seems to do everything we want, and more. It’s a newsletter plugin by Satollo. Netherlands law stops internet marketers from junk mailing people (not that we would ever spam anyone)and this plugin has two steps so people must confirm their subscription by email. The plugin also manages our list of subscribers so we can group them, or simply delete them should they request it.
Installing the plugin was simple, and I added it to the side bar of the website in one click then customised the subscription title and message.
Then I secretly subscribed my husband to my website to see it all the links worked 
. And they did!
If you want to subscribe too, go to the website www.twomotivatingminds.com and simply click the subscribe button.
One of the nicest things about WordPress when you use it for blogging is the statistics tool that shows how many visitors you have each day, and which posts are most popular.
Unfortunately this function is not available when you use wordpress to design a website, so I had to add a statistics tool plugin to our website www.twomotivatingminds.com.
The most hyped plugin is Google Analytics – and I love all things google so I signed up for that, and followed the instructions.
Once you are signed up, GA generates a few lines of code which you are supposed to insert into each of the pages you want to track. The instructions say to insert the tracker code into the webpage in the HTML between the bodytags, directly before the tag </body> . Sounds easy, doesn’t it? (Now I have written this loads of people are going to tell me exactly where I went wrong here!)
But I could not see exactly where to insert the code, and I tried and I tried, and I tried. The main problem with GA is that you have to wait 24 hours for your first report to generate, so each time I did it (wrongly), I needed to wait until the next day to be rewarded by my error message. 
I went back to the drawing board with this, and checked out other statistical plugins available to me as a user of Blue Host and Simple Scripts.
They recommend PIWIK as an analytical tool. It has the advantages that data reports are updated every few minutes and Simple Scripts advertised that it could be installed in one click!
So I changed tack and made that one click then checked my reports. Nothing. Time to read the small print.
My main problem was that half of my instructions were in English and the other half were in Dutch. It took some time but I found the button to change the language eventually and everything became much clearer. Including the instructions.
As with Google Analytics, I needed to insert the tracker code in my website, but unlike GA, they told me where to do that (in the footer.php file)
And within minutes I had my first data populated report. I was thrilled! Another milestone reached, yeah!
Now all I need are lots of visitors to our website Two Motivating Minds in order to get lots of lovely statistics reports. Click on the link and be one of those visitors today!
Our new venture www.twomotivatingminds.com provides high quality coaching tools and services to businesses, coaching professional and individuals. We wanted to make it really easy for people to order and pay for the products so I wanted use Paypal. Setting up a Paypal account, and installing a paypal button was perhaps the simplest thing I have added to our web site www.twomotivatingminds.com.
First I set up a merchant account in Paypal and linked it to the website. Then I selected one of Paypal’s button forms, and customised that with the item name, price per item and shipping cost.
Paypal generated a few lines of code automatically and gave instructions on how to copy and paste that directly into the webpage next to the picture of the item to sell. So simple!
If you click here you will see the result!
And the best thing about Paypal, is that buyers do not need a Paypal account, they can use their credit card.
Paypal also produce the shopping cart for the customer personalised with our website name as header.
This system works fine for us as we have a limited number of sales items. The drawback could be if you wanted to set up a webshop with many items, you need to customise every button for every item, so if you have a lot of products you have to keep repeating the procedure.
I guess then you would need to buy another e-commerce program to work alongside Paypal to make that part of the installation easier.
But for our needs Paypal is a great tool.
After the problems I had beginning to set up the website, I began to feel much more confident of my abilities to get the project finished!
After not making a backup of my website www.twomotivatingminds.com and the total design wipe out debacle that I wrote about yesterday I recreated the appearance of our website and set up the pages with the first draft of our text. Having learned from my mistake I really wanted to find out how to make a back up of the website, and started to investigate how to do it – after all “site backup pro961175” was included in the BlueHost fees.
Another question to the help desk!
Answer:
You can download a Full Cpanel Backup that was already done by the system backups. Log into Cpanel, go to Site Backup Restore, under Backups, select Full Cpanel Backup, and choose from any of the three backups listed there. You can archive those to your account root, and then you can use FTP to download.
Thank you,
So I did.
But since then I have been having problems with this backup and restore function, and it gives you an uneasy feeling. I’ve contacted BlueHost about this, and has some help – but sometimes its not possible to make a back up before 16:00p.m European time (I think it must be when the system in America is not so busy. As a test I managed to restore a backup once, but don’t feel particularly confident that it will work every time with my computer (I use XP and explorer 8 – which may not be the optimal system)
BlueHost offer the option of restoring directly from their own daily, weekly or monthly backup files, but I am a control freak and as security I need current copy of the website in my own hands (or in a backup file in my computer!). Wouldn’t you?