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Cleaning up hosting quality for better service and efficiency

September 17, 2016 by Thomas Z Lukoma Leave a Comment

cleaning-381090_1280

A couple of years ago, I made a major move from Hostgator to Media Temple for all my client critical websites, including this website.  At the time, my move was in reaction to unfortunate circumstances, so my selection of host was done under duress.  Thank goodness I found Media Temple, and it served me very well.  But there was one problem.

The cost.

I only have one client that needed the resiliency provided by Media Temple, so paying the amount I was paying monthly for all the other non-revenue-generating sites was not prudent – I ended up keeping the majority of the sites at Hostgator.

Unfortunately, that meant that for the past 18 months, I have actually had two hosts and paid two hosting fees – not cool.  Since I was focused on a platform-building project that was centered around editing a book, I did not have as much focus on my website hosting set-up and I have paid for it over that time.

Earlier this year, through my usual blog reading, I stumbled upon a host that I have completely fallen in love with because of the simplicity of their service, affordability and superior customer service – Siteground.  Once I had vetted their service, I put together a migration project plan on Trello for all the wordpress websites I manage and proceeded to procrastinate for several months without implementing it fully.

siteground__quality-crafted_hosting_services

The main reason for my hesitation to complete the plan was email hosting.  In the past, I have hosted my email at the same host as the WordPress website and used cPanel to manage the email accounts.  The biggest problem for me with this approach is that I have to assign the passwords for the users and they can’t update them without my intervention – which inevitably requires me to know other people’s passwords.

I wanted to find a way to extract myself from the password management business for email and it was during this search that I discovered Zoho Mail – another product that I am totally in love with.

email_hosting___hosted_email_for_businesses_-_zoho_mail

Last night, I bit the bullet and stayed up late implementing the entire migration plan – websites and emails.

I am proud to say that I can now retire both my Media Temple and Hostgator hosting accounts and consolidate all the websites on Siteground and all the mission critical email on Zoho Mail.

I will write more about what that process was like, but for now, I’m just taking a big breath of relief and looking forward to my next web designing project.

Update:

If you are interested in other alternatives to hosting email for your business in a cost-effective way, this is a great article that covers the topic comprehensively.

Filed Under: Hosting, Making Things Happen, Technology, Wordpress Tagged With: hostgator, media-temple, siteground, zohomail

To grok or not to grok …

October 31, 2014 by Thomas Z Lukoma Leave a Comment

Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science—and it means as little to us (because of our Earthling assumptions) as color means to a blind man. – Robert A. Heinlein  via Wikipedia

640px-sf_legion_of_honor_thinker_2

For several years, starting with a simple blog on WordPress.com and then hosting my own and other people’s websites, I have grown to have a deep appreciation for the WordPress platform.  Both from the perspective of a publisher, and from a tinkerer who plays around with the backend workings of the platform.  I am now at a point where I know the power of the platform and can perform most of the basic requirements to get a site up and running – but I don’t know enough to have a creative idea and implement that idea from start to finish.

Being able to do that would be my definition of ‘groking’ WordPress – and that is something I would very much love to do.

So, in addition to educating about platforms, this blog is also a place for me to ‘work out loud’ about my journey as I figure my way around WordPress – philosophically, technically and practically.

I think its gonna be fun.

(Image courtesy of Andreas Praefcke)

 

Filed Under: Wordpress

If you want to grow your tribe, free yourself from WordPress.com

June 29, 2014 by Thomas Z Lukoma 4 Comments

If you want to grow your tribe, migrate your WordPress.com blog to a self-hosted version of WordPress

Hosting a blog with WordPress.com and using the software from WordPress.org to host the blog yourself are not the same thing. This distinction is often confusing.

I am working with a client who is preparing for the launch of his first book and a critical component of his marketing and launch strategy is the community he has built on his blog. The blog was hosted on WordPress.com for over 3 years and had a healthy following of several hundred that received his weekly blog posts and engaged with him on his content.

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In our initial meeting, he explained that he had received feedback from several advisors that he needed to move off WordPress.com and get a self-hosted version of his blog prior to launching the book and significantly growing his tribe.  He understood conceptually that this was important to do, but he wanted me to both outline the benefits clearly and help him to actually implement the migration since this is not an area of expertise for him.

Since setting up an account is free, WordPress.com is a good testing ground if you are trying to determine whether or not you want to publish content on a consistent basis. But once you get the hang of blogging and know that you want to do it consistently, I am a big advocate of switching over to a self-hosted version.  The WordPress.com platform provides a rich set of functionality, but there are some significant limitations which don’t lend themselves well to building a brand and extending your reach with your tribe.

Customization is limited on WordPress.com

Your blog will look like other bloggers hosted on the platform because you are not permitted to install custom themes with the free service.  There are hundreds of themes to choose from on WordPress.com but since the platform has millions of users, there is a good chance that the styling of your blog will look like several other blogs.

With a self-hosted blog, the ‘look and feel’ of your blog is only limited by the capabilities of the person designing the website since you can build a theme from scratch or modify one of the millions of WordPress themes available online.

Functionality is limited too

The open-source version of WordPress has evolved from its initial roots as a blogging software to a full-blown content management system (CMS) that can power major websites for well established brands across a wide variety of industries.  The wide range of capabilities for WordPress as a content management system is primarily provided through the use of plugins.  When you are using the self-hosted version of WordPress, you have access to such a large variety of functionality through these plugins that most of the time if you can think of something you want to accomplish on your website, you can find a plugin that does it.

WordPress.com on the other hand, for security reasons, limits the number of plugins that can be used with their blogs which means that you would not be able to extend the functionality of your site past the handful of plugins that are currently available (for example, you are limited to their site statistics plugin and cannot use Google Analytics).

Your interactions with your tribe are dictated by the WordPress.com platform

The final reason I recommend migrating your site if you are taking the next step and want to grow your tribe is to gain better control over the interactions with that community.  In WordPress.com, you grow your community by getting people to subscribe to your blog (if they are not signed up with WordPress) and to ‘follow’ you (if they are a part of the WordPress.com community).  They then become your ‘subscribers’ and receive a notification every time you publish new content.

You also have the WordPress comments function connected to each article or page that you publish and you can interact directly with your tribe there through discussion threads below your posts.

This set-up works well if the comments and email-each-post functionality is all you need.

But what happens when you want to interact with your tribe via email in a more personal way with content that is not published on your public website or blog?

What if you want to reward people who have shown their commitment to your message by signing up on your site? Maybe you would like to give them sneak previews of an upcoming book or special offers for an event that is not available to casual visitors of your site.

You can’t with WordPress.com.

But you can with a self-hosted version of WordPress.

And that’s just scratching the surface.  Depending on where else you interact with your subscribers outside of your site, you can integrate with other social networks like Facebook and Twitter in several cool and interesting ways.  You can get as creative as you want – because you have the flexibility.

I hope that helps to give you a good understanding of the benefits you can get from migrating to a self-hosted version of WordPress.  My next couple of posts will go into the actual process of migrating from WordPress.com and some of my recent experiences transferring my client’s site this past weekend.

Filed Under: Tribe Building, Wordpress

Becoming more efficient as a web designer

March 1, 2014 by Thomas Z Lukoma Leave a Comment

For the past two years I have learned a lot about web design in general and WordPress web design in particular. I demystified HTML and CSS for myself by taking the self-paced courses at Code Academy and then applied what I learned to customize some simple sites.

Through trial and error and a lot of ‘googling’ late into the night, I have taught myself a good amount of web design and WordPress skills.

I learned about the core capabilities of the WordPress CMS by getting a simple hosting account and experimenting.  First by migrating my personal blog from WordPress.com to my own hosting and then offering to take on some family and friends as my first clients.

As I gained more confidence, and my commitment grew, I increased my level of investment beyond just owning a hosting account.

  • I signed up for the monthly subscription with Adobe and graduated from designing with Gimp to using the professional standards of Photoshop and Illustrator
  • I signed up with WPMU Dev and iThemes to access a rich community of knowledge about WordPress and web design. WPMU really opened my eyes about what can be achieved with plugins and iThemes BackupBuddy plugin is a lifesaver
  • I invested in three awesome books (WordPress Web Design for Dummies, Web Designer’s Guide to WordPress and Blog Design for Dummies) that have given me more confidence in my foundational knowledge and where I want to focus this journey of discovery

I am now at a place where I have no doubt that I can be an exceptional web designer and a WordPress expert. I know how to get unstuck when I don’t know what I am doing and I have a borderline obsession with figuring out how to make my ideas come to life on the web.

My biggest obstacle is not talent or access to information.

My biggest gap is process.

It takes me too long to go from concept to implementation because I don’t have an orderly approach to my work. At the end of the project I have always produced work that my clients really like but it is sometimes too painful to get to that point.

The “figure-it-out as I go approach” is what has helped me learn as much as I have until now but I think its time to inject a higher level of professionalism and control to my work.

Inspired by Chris Coyier’s exceptional talk below, I realized that what I am missing is my own web design workflow that I can repeat and use to build consistency into my outcomes.

So over the next few months, as I work on my current projects, I will document my best practices on this blog.  I know I still have a long way to go towards my goals as a designer, and I am excited because I know that this particular step is going to completely transform my ability to consistently repeat success.

Filed Under: Business, Design, Productivity, Wordpress Tagged With: old_version, wordpress

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