I think I am going to write a post like this every week, where I reflect on the week past and perhaps set goals and outline plans for the following week.

I have been very busy this past week working on the blog, having put in what I estimate to be around 50 hours into the blog this week, give or take maybe 5 hours.  This has involved some of the design elements that you see, such as the banner at the top with my name and the tag line in it, as well as layout elements, and has involved choosing, installing, and configuring various plugins, and of course, writing content.  It has made time go by quickly though, as I have enjoyed it.

Regarding content so far, I’m pretty satisfied with the writing I’ve done in the past week.  I feel that I’ve churned out valuable, quality content each day.  It has been a fun challenge to write new content daily.  I hope readers will find value in what I have written.  Feel free to use the contact form to let me know if you found value in something I wrote, or if you have questions concerning something I’ve written.

WordPress

For anyone who doesn’t know, a Content Management System (CMS) is software that allows one to manage a website and it’s content more easily, with everything organized (in theory at least) into one back end website tool where the administrator has a user interface to access and edit everything.  It’s meant to make things a lot more simple than hand-coding everything.  WordPress, a web-based platform which is free to use, is arguably the most popular CMS available right now due, in large part, to the fact that it’s quite user friendly.

I must say, I love WordPress.

  This was not always the case.  I never used to care for it much.  I tried it once or twice with websites in the past, and it just wasn’t as versatile then.  Between then and now, it’s developers have done a terrific job of increasing the software’s versatility.  There are now literally thousands and thousands of user created plugins that allow you to do virtually anything you want with your website.  It’s pretty impressive.  For example, the recent posts feature in the sidebar and the related posts feature at the bottom of each post are each the product of plugins. 

There are lots of plugins I’d like to use, and I probably will add many more that affect the back end of the website but only a few more that affect the front end.  There are a lot more that I’d like to add to the front end, but I have to be careful, as I don’t want to make the blog look cluttered.  I’ve been trying to narrow down the plugins I want to use that affect the front end, weeding out plugins that don’t make anything less than perfect sense for adding to the blog in it’s current state.

What’s Next

As for future plans, I am going to add a forum to the blog.  I’m just not exactly sure yet when I want to add it.  Part of me wants to go ahead and add it, and get it out of the way.  Another part of me thinks it might be a better idea to wait until traffic to my blog has increased a bit more before adding the forum.

My goals for the next week are to add an “about me” page and to finish SEO (search engine optimization) for the blog, while continuing to write new content every day.

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