The iAssistant is an AssistU trained virtual assistant who also writes instructional ebooks about WordPress plugins.
Author Archive
No SEO Plugin With Thesis
Posted by: | CommentsOne of the reasons I chose Thesis, aside from its appearance, was the builtin SEO features. Say goodbye to Michael Torbert’s SEO WordPress plugin (but thanks to him for his hard work)!
The Thesis philosophy is simple—you can change your design all you want, but you should never change the core code that powers your website. For long-term success in the search engines, it is crucial to serve semantic, information-rich HTML that loads quickly, and optimization and efficiency are two areas where Thesis shines.
As I’ve said before, I’m not that tech savvy. What I see when I look at a new post page in Thesis that I don’t see in my old theme, even with the SEO plugin, is more SEO fields to complete.
This is what I see in Thesis.
This is what I see in my current theme.
I’m still investigating all this, and I repeat: Thesis has a learning curve.
Isn’t it fun?
The Easiest Way To Move A Blog
Posted by: | CommentsWhen I first started thinking about moving this blog to a new domain, I was really dreading it. I’m not that tech savvy, and in the past, moving my WordPress blogs have caused my sites to be down for several days. Since I sell two ebooks about plugins, Contact Form 7 and Subscribe2, on this site, I certainly didn’t want it to go down at all!
So, I started doing all the research ahead of time to ensure a smooth move. After purchasing Thesis and realizing it had quite a learning curve, I went to the DIY forum. I thought that migrating this blog to My WP Works, a Thesis site, might be harder than I thought.
Within a few minutes, pbarron on this thread, had answered my question. It was unbelievably easy! Just a few simple steps and all my blog posts and images were in place on the new domain.
To move the plugins, I went into my cpanel’s File Manager and copied and pasted them to the new domain. Many of them needed no setup at all, a few did. And some still don’t work. More on that later. I’m not sure how many of them I’ll need because Thesis has so many gadgets built into it.
My new site was up in seconds. I’m still amazed. There were a few glitches, like the permalinks. I couldn’t get them to work, but it was my own dizziness. I had set the permalink to custom: /%post-name%/. It should have been: /%postname%/. Once I did that, everything worked exactly as it should.
Don’t forget to go into Dashboard/Settings and change the General, Writing, Reading, and anything else that would be set up with a first-time installation. Otherwise, the information for the new blog will read for the previous one.
I’ve discovered my Contact Form 7 forms don’t work, but haven’t had time to investigate why. It seems that every Thesis page is a blog page with a place for comments. Maybe that’s why. I’ll get back to you on that.
My list of email subscribers in Subscribe2 didn’t move to the new domain, but there weren’t that many so I’ll transfer them manually. Any of you want to sign up? 
Bye for now, talk with you soon!
Thesis Has A Learning Curve
Posted by: | CommentsFirst, let me apologize for my lapse in posting. I am in the process, as previously mentioned, of migrating this blog over to a new domain: My WP Works. Along with the new domain, the site is getting a complete makeover.
It seemed that every site I really like had the same clean, organized look, and they were all powered by the Thesis theme. So, I purchased Thesis for a mere $87. While I waited on my logo art from Pamela Wilson at Big Brand System, I tweaked the layout. (By the way, I am very pleased with my new logo!)
While Thesis is great, it does have a learning curve. It doesn’t run out of the box, so if you buy it, be prepared to do some research or hire someone to do it for you. I love figuring out all that techy stuff, so I jumped right in.
I’m going to write a post about WordPress’s import/export feature, so I’ll save the details of that for later this week. I’m also going to post about Thesis’s builtin SEO. According to what I’ve read, you can just uninstall the SEO plugin. Thesis has everything you need for great SEO. I’ve also noticed there are several plugins I used with this website that don’t seem to work or are not needed. More on that in the next posts.
Thesis has great support. The DIY forum is active, and you can have an answer in sometimes minutes.
Take a look at My WP Works and let me know what you think!
The iAssistant Is Getting A New Look
Posted by: | CommentsA few months ago, I joined Lateral Action: Creativity + Productivity = Success. Then I joined Sonia Simon’s Remarkable Marketing Blueprint. Most recently, I joined Third Tribe Marketing.And now, I am different, and my business is different. It’s hard to explain what has changed, but I’ll try. I’m more focused. I have ideas, lots of them. I have a plan to carry out my ideas. I have a community to mentor me and offer advice. All three websites are alike, and yet very different. I highly recommend them all.
So, I need a new look to go with my new ideas and have asked Pamela Wilson – Big Brand System (also a 3rd Triber) to design the logo for my new site: My WP Works. It is forthcoming toward the end of this week.
Part of what I have found is that I enjoy working with WordPress sites, and more specifically WordPress plugins, so hence the move to my new URL – My WordPress Works. Because of trademark legalities, I did not use the full WordPress name in the URL, only the first letters, as requested by Matt Mullenweg.
Another change: after working with Lateral Action, Remarkable Marketing Blueprint, and most recently, Third Tribe Marketing, I find myself in love with Thesis and have purchased it for my new look. While I enjoy the different themes I’ve purchased from iThemes, I think Thesis will work best for my new look.
Thesis is installed and active at My WP Works, but the site is anything but complete, so if you decide to visit now, do so with the intention of coming back in a month to see the final product. Looking at it now will be good experience if you want to see a makeover in progress!
To return to the original focus of my blog, my next posts will chronicle the plugins that transition from this site to My WP Works. The Hard, The Easy, and The Impossible!
Lovely Radio Buttons In Contact Form 7
Posted by: | CommentsRadio buttons add pizazz to your custom submission form and are easier for some site visitors to use. There’s always the problem of remembering to click out of the radio button to make sure it doesn’t change, but all in all, they are very quick. And we all know how fast our site visitors want things to flow.
If you’re brave and ambitious, you could create surveys using this feature of the WordPress Contact Form 7 plugin.
