Presenting Blog Categories: This Website

I think every website needs a place where announcements related to structure and maintenance are collected and so I’ve created a category for the purpose, This Website. It will cover both maintenance-related, scheduled tech updates and announcements on new additions to the website structure, so keep reading for tips on how you can improve your visitor experience, too.

Updating a website and showing Maintenance Mode

If you’re running your own self-hosted website, you’re possibly aware of the need to infrequently update tech stuff such as the platform or plugins. Or if you’ll be introducing new features or plugins, you might want to test them behind a maintenance screen.

The plugin I used during my Coming Soon mode, Coming Soon Page & Maintenance Mode by SeedProd, will be possible to use also as a Maintenance Mode plugin.

I had added a photograph of a mountain view to the Coming Soon mode and while the plugin claimed to allow responsive behaviour, on an iPhone screen the background picture looked wrong. Of course I noticed this only a couple of weeks ago, so I have no idea of how many saw it before I removed the image and kept it to favicon and text only. It’s a free plugin so I’m not complaining, but do test on more than a desktop screen to make sure you’re displaying what you intended.

Now I’ve inactivated the plugin and once time comes to do some tech updates, first I’ll notify on the blog in this category, and then on the scheduled time the plugin will be activated and active.

Oh, scheduled? Yes, absolutely. Recently I visited a website that kept showing a white screen for at least two days, and had I been a new visitor fresh from Pinterest, the pin would not have been pinned after all. Likely, I also would never have returned, because to me that’s just unprofessional.

In particular if you’re offering courses and other material as part of the website, a paying customer or potential future customer or client should be kept in the loop. But I digress!

Other stuff in This Website

Other things I can think of to put in this blog category would be announcing a new page or feature that wouldn’t be baked into an introductory blog post in one of the five other blog categories. By this I mean that if I were to launch for instance a new health-related course, I would publish a post in Health to announce it. And the post would be at home.

Announcing a new page of more utilitarian nature such as a Newsletter page or a Start Here page, however, would either be out of place in Health, Medicine & Science, Simplify, The Arts, or Personal Branding & Entrepreneurship, or correctly archived in This Website.

And how about those media kits? HTML site maps? Yup, This Website.

There isn’t much more to say, since I can’t figure out how to wax lyrical about this topic, so I’ll wrap up with a promise to post frequently in the beginning, just to show what I’m about.

There’s no way I can, or want to quite frankly, keep posting on an almost daily basis in the long run, because who would have time to read it all? Not I and most likely not you either. But for a while I think it’s important to establish myself properly and so you’ll ‘hear my voice’ across the blog categories in a bit of a random-but-cohesive mix.

I hope you’ll enjoy it as well as chime in! I warmly welcome respectful comments and questions, and hope to create a place for active dialogue here. Once again thanks for reading!