I’ve been revamping my website lately and decided to see what all the fuss was about regarding page builders and some nifty plugins that are available.- In the WordPress ocean, there are alternatives galore.
Rather than make a hideous mistake, I grabbed one of the best utility plugins available, ‘WP-staging’, and let it build me a copy of the blog so I could play. And play I did.
I threw different templates, builders, and bunches of plugins at it willy-nilly, to see what would stick. I broke staging twice with crap that shredded things up badly. heh.
In the process of doing that, I discovered something cool. I didn’t need most of it. 😀
After working with several page building frameworks, I settled on Elementor. I like it so much, I may even throw some money their way for the ‘pro’ version. Right now the ‘lite/free’ version is doing the trick.
For most things I do with this site, just the basic editor works aces, but if I want to customize the landing page, or work with headers/footers and such, a tool like this really simplifies things…after getting over the learning curve of the builder itself.
There are a couple builders that are “better”, but you have to fork over money or they are completely crippled, and I prefer a free base platform, paying for ‘extras’ if I feel I truly need them and can justify the price.
[Aside: WordPress has recently updated their editor to use a tool called “Gutenberg”. I like to refer to it as “Goober of the Borg”, and hated it…and put the classic editor back in (drumroll) as a plugin. While the new editor does work (for the most part), it was released far too early (imho) and is buggy and incompatible with a lot of stuff out in the WordPress universe.]
Working on a website/blog/CMS portal can be very educational, but at some point you have to say “good enough” and just use it. Artists and writers sometimes fall into this trap. They tweak and tweak and edit and change things up to the point where stuff turns into a never ending soup of “not perfect yet”.
[Aside: ‘CMS’ stands for Content Management System for all you non-webhead types.]
With updates to my hosting site as well as revamping the blog, I’ve also had to jump into the swamp that is…S E O. This cute three letter acronym stands for:
Search Engine Optimization
It is what enables better search results in, you guessed it, search engines.
I looked at a few different plugins as well as default stuff, and I have to say that even though I’m a pretty good “propeller head” when it comes to all things Tech(tm), this felt more like wading into some Madison Avenue marketing boardroom meeting. I got through it, but yuck.
And that is all I’m going to say about SEO. 😀
Anyway, more stuff to do from time to time, but I’m pretty happy with things at this point.
Now back to pounding my head against the wall for the “real writing”.
