Using Your New Blog Straight Away
Once you have paid, we will send you an email with the blog URL, login and password. You can then log in and start using your brand new WordPress blog and Thesis theme straight away.
Initially your blog is placed on our domain – it will be something like pbs0601.powerblogservice.com, and is unique to you. Later when you are ready we move it onto your domain name.
Creating Pages For Your Website
In the Prep Zone, you can start adding some articles to the site, and think about how you want to organize the content on the site.
A typical site will have a number of pages such as: Home Page, About Us, Contact Us, FAQ, Guarantee, Privacy Statement, Terms and Conditions, Services and Pricing. This information could apply to almost any business website.
Organizing Your Website
You then have your posts/articles categories to consider. Ideally you will be adding several articles per week.
On this site we have the following post categories: Blog, FAQ, Features, Knowledge Base, Tutorials and WordPress. For example, a gardening site would have a completely different set of Categories such as: Flowers, Vegetables, Garden Design, Garden Equipment, etc.
Also at this stage, you should about how you want to deliver content on the site, how much is text and pictures on the page, how much is video, how much in newsletters, how much in podcasts and how much in downloadable brochures. This will affect how you create the design.
Content Led Design
We believe it is useful to accumulate some of this material and think about how you want to organize before spending time on the design elements. This is the opposite to the traditional approach where you hire a web designer to create the site. Here the question being asked is:
“Given I have this set of visual material and my objective is …..(complete this yourself) what graphical elements and layout will aid the site achieve its goal?”
The role of the web designer is more akin to that of a beautician, taking what there is and making it more appealing. The web designer is not allowed to do plastic surgery so the design fee is kept low.
Your site may stay in the prep zone anything between a couple of days and a month depending on how fast you want to move the site forward.
Moving Out Of The Prep Zone And Going Live
When you have chosen a domain name and you have added some content in the Prep Zone then you are ready to go live.
Typically we’ll ask you to send us details of the domain you have purchased and we will make the necessary DNS changes on your behalf. The domain name change takes a day or two to propagate across the entire internet.
We also take the necessary steps with Google, Yahoo and Bing Webmaster Tools to get your site registered as soon as possible in the search engine rankings.