The Hidden To Do List Of Blog Building Job I Wasn’t Fully Aware

So, what I managed to do since the last posting?

1. Removing demo posts and pages from public view
   As I mentioned in one of the previous posts, although I chose to install only the main settings of my theme, installation ended up with complete prewritten (‘Lorem ipsum’ kind of) demo content which I have to get rid of, now.
   To be precise, 72 posts and eight pages.

   No problem, if I would just delete them. WordPress has that nice bulk option, and in few clicks, I would be done. But, I didn’t want just to remove them. I wanted to keep them as available templates, but hidden from public view. Therefore, and because I didn’t figure out any better shortcut, I had to edit whole 80 of them, one by one, to turn the visibility from ‘Public’ to ‘Private’ view.

   My dear Lord, what a motivating blog building job! 😛 😀

2. Organizing Main Menu and how it would behave on scroll
   It was an easy task that I finished setting up with several tweaks and clicks. But, then a fabulous idea crossed my mind about…
   
   
3. Adding Icons to Main Menu
   

   Yes, I wanted that house icon for my home page. I installed Font Awesome 4 Menus Plugin to be able to use a collection of icons that comes with this free plugin. But I didn’t stop there as I discovered many more ways I can use the plugin, e.g. rotating heart for my ‘Day By Day’ category.
   

   Of course, I tested some other options too 😉 and played with it like a little kid, not noticing how fast the time is just passing by.

   (One of the reasons why took me so long to publish my next post.)

   I don’t know am I so easy distractable, despite my age so playful or some crazy perfectionist who has to observe and test every single detail. But, I know for sure whatever it is, it makes me terribly slow. I feel like the slowest, and smallest snail appears like Speedy Gonzales in comparison with me. 😉

   

4. Setting up Social Counter
   Luckily the theme has this feature, so I need to make some slight tweaks and changes to make it look the way I wanted.
   It looks nice if you may show your site visitors how many followers you already have on other social media networks (despite the fact that the number of my followers is quite small), and at the same time to invite them to follow you there. 🙂 
5. Putting Affiliate Advertisements on the Sidebar
   In fact, I put only one – ad block for Blue-Host. As I’m running my site on Blue-Host, also being their (I must say, very satisfied) user for about ten years by now, it was almost natural I would use my affiliate link to promote them.
6. Additional fine-tuning of the look and feel of the site
   I made dozens of small changes (like the size of fonts, e.g.), overall look and feel of the home page which would look even better through time, as I’m going to add more posts, and which currently (with only a few articles posted) can’t be fully seen.

   As well, I made few adjustments of default post template, category and tag pages, etc.

7. Installing several useful plugins
   By following Jens Steyaert’s advice I installed and activated the following plugins:
   – Yoast SEO plugin

   – WP Super Cache

   – WP Smush (image compression plugin)

   – a3 Lazy Load (site speed up plugin)

   – Pretty Link Lite – free version

   – WP-Optimize

   Most of those plugins I was familiar with, but few of them were new to me or at least didn’t use them before.

   The only plugin I didn’t install from Jens’ recommendation list is Social Warfare. I didn’t install it as first because the theme I chose already has integrated the vast majority of social buttons. Secondly, the free version of the plugin doesn’t offer the features I would like to have. Above all, under the plugin reviews, I found a lot of complaints regarding their support (even for the paid premium customers). One user even reported a complete breakdown of his site caused by the plugin what in combination with the total absence of support ultimately turned off the slightest idea I might have to install this plugin.