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Website building

Billy87

So I am really wanting to make a go of this working from home thing as a writer, I think it's all I can cope with during my burnout. Realistically, I dont see myself going into a school or office full of people for a while. 

I want to make a website as like a blog type thing for my sports writing. I have tried to do this before, I went to wordpress, bought a domain name and went through their process to build my site but it looked rubbish, couldnt even work out how to set the menus or change the colours, let alone how to get it to appear on peoples google searches so no one ever saw it. Ive tried several times and wasted money on it but cant seem to figure it out. Im not hopeless with techy stuff but im certainly not the best.

Does anyone have any hints or tips or places I could go for advice? Would be really apprecaited 

  • I had the same problem when I tried to set up my writing site on WordPress. It was confusing, and I couldn’t make it look good.

    What helped me was hiring a professional service. They designed the layout, set up menus, and optimized it for Google. They also showed me how to make small changes. It cost about $300, but it was worth it. You can check out https://pbb.lviv.ua/en/ for more details. They can help you get your site looking great and working well.

  • I use Squarespace for my photography website, its relatively straight forward as they have many templates to suit everyone's needs. I think they also do blog layouts etc, check them out.

    Squarespace

  • I think my first concern is that a lot of people are using Facebook now, and in some countries, it's largely supplanting custom Web sites. Then the other thing I run into, is that I enjoy solving really unique and detailed problems to keep my mind engaged, but Web development could become very cut-and-paste production-line-like, and you may even be stuck doing it that way in order to be competitive. I'd like to hear how it goes. It might just be kind of visceral apprehension, because I suppose you could make a bunch of standard templates and become really fast at it without too much boredom.

  • [spam removed by mod]

  • You can blog and periodically post new articles there or take journalism courses and run a channel, put everything on the blog. And then you can develop this blog

  • in reply to Bebe

    Havnt heard of elementor, Im not very IT savvy. I will message you if thats ok

  • If you're still using wordpress I could build it with you, free of charge, you could add me on to your team if you wanted. I used to build websites for clients as a freelancer, currently I'm helping out a relative. But I'll be free to help you soon too

  • Do you use elementor? it makes it easier to drag and drop features on your wordpress website. 

  • in reply to Starfox

    oh and yes hyperlinks/weblinks are where you link the text in an article/webpage, so where a paragraph on a website might say "We would love it if you *send us an email* to request a call" and the send us an email text is a link to a contact page/opens a window to send an email, that would be classed a hyperlink

  • in reply to Billy87

    google analytics allows you to see the way in which people are interacting with your website. The amount of clicks, the amount of time they spend on which pages, where in the world they are looking at it from, on what sort of device! Basically it breaks down all the statistics to show the busiest times for your site and if teamed up with google ads (for bigger sites) allows you to optimise the amount of traffic to a site when utilising good SEO (search engine optimisation) using keywords which people commonly use in search engines

  • My late hubby was into building websites he used WordPress and got on well with it. It had a lot of extras which allowed him to add comment sections and ability to put in YouTube videos. I don't know a lot about it though. You could look on YouTube someone might have done a list online.

  • in reply to Catlover

    Probobly very silly question but what are hyperlinks? Is that when you post a link to a webpage inside another webpage? 

    I havnt tried google analytics, what is that? 

  • in reply to Billy87

    It’s been a long time since I built websites. Things may have changed, but spent a lot of my time ensuring I was using the best keywords and tags for my content. Imagine you are going into Google to look up what your site involves. What searches would you do? What words would keep coming up?
    I used plenty of hyperlinks between my pages, and to articles on my pages. When you write blogs or articles, link these back to your website. Use all the social media you can handle and post new stuff consistently, and link it to the pages in your website, make sure you use alt text with all pictures. Put your best keywords in the first paragraph of your pages,  it don’t overdo it. 
    you’ll need to do this regularly. Always checking, changing, updating your pages etc. it doesn’t happen overnight, and I don’t think you will get into the first page of Google. 
    Do you use Google analytics? That used to be quite helpful for me.

  • Also does anyone know how to get your website up the search list on google? Every time Ive done one before it seems invisible when Ive searched for it

  • in reply to Desmond79

    Is Wix a website builder too?