What happens when you know you need a blog but don’t know where to start?

There are so many options out there, each with their own set of challenges, but what if you want the authority of your own domain name and ownership of a blog on your own web host?

That’s why Jennifer V. Miller came to me. She wanted to set up a blog to communicate her expertise in HR, improving corporate culture and interpersonal relationships. But she found that all the conflicting and confusing information on the internet about how to set up a blog made her wary of the time and effort involved.

Jennifer was one of my very first clients and the biggest obstacle in the way of hiring the WPChick (aka Yours Truly) to help her set up a blog was the fact that at the time I had no testimonials (aka social proof—something I’m working on starting with this post) and I seemed unproven to her. But she took a chance.

The Problem:

She not only wanted to set up a blog, but she wanted to learn how to add content, change themes, add plugins, back up and maintain her blog herself.

As a self-professed non-techie, she knew she needed help to learn how to do all that stuff, and the instructions she was finding on the ‘net at the time weren’t very helpful.

So we began.

The Solution:

In June of 2009, I installed WordPress for Jennifer on her host and pointed her domain name to this new host. I added a few basic plugins and a theme she had chosen.

Shortly afterwards, we scheduled our first live screen-sharing session.

If you’re not familiar with screen-sharing, it’s the best way to teach tech-related stuff to anyone. It enables me to see my clients’ screens just as if I were sitting at the desk with them. I can see how they’re interacting with their WordPress site and point them in the right direction. What I’ve found is the visual aspect of my coaching sessions, even more than just a video tutorial, helps my clients learn quickly.

Jennifer loved being able to see how to do things with her site during the screen-sharing sessions as well as have me walk her through how to post, edit and add new themes and plugins to WordPress.

Since installing her site, I’ve taught her through our screen sharing sessions how to take care of her site, how it looks, how it works and adding and editing her posts and pages.

Now she no longer has to depend on a web developer that would take weeks to do one minor change or waste hours of her time learning code. Instead, Jennifer was able to grab the reins of her blog and run, all within the very first session. Everything that’s on her site right now is her work—pictures and text—all of it learned with just a few screen-sharing sessions.

Jennifer also appreciated that I always asked what her objectives were and what she wanted her blog to do for her. She says that it helps keep her focused and provide a blog that will meet her readers’ needs. It’s not enough just to have a blog. You need to know what you want to achieve with that blog and how to craft posts that will help you get there.

Now, how about some results?

Her blog and her writing has increased her exposure to media outlets, leading to features on Forbes.com and an article in the print version of Executive Travel magazine. All that from a few months of blogging. She’s gained authority in her field, people trust what she has to say, and she’s giving herself way more exposure to media and potential clients as a result of blogging regularly.

Our business relationship is still ongoing, and she schedules coaching sessions from time to time to ramp up on some new stuff she wants to do with her site and get answers to things that pop up in the normal course of maintaining your own WordPress site.

If you want to see Jennifer’s site, you can go to http://people-equation.com.

What WPChick services did Jennifer use?

She bought a basic install and several WordPress coaching sessions. This is the best way to go if you want to get started making your blog into what you want it to be as quickly as possible and want to be able to handle the maintenance and updating by yourself.

Do you need help with WordPress?

Are you a small biz owner like Jennifer who wants a blog? Awesome! Head on over to the Packages or Coaching pages and see what I offer.

If you don’t see what you want or need to ask some questions, don’t hesitate to ask!

Fill in the form below and I’ll get back to you ASAP.

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Someone on Twitter had a problem updating her WordPress installation to 2.8.4. You know, there is a security update (yes, I know… the 4th one in almost as many weeks since 2.8 was released).

Anyway, she kept on encountering this problem, even after the upgrade seemed to complete:
An automated WordPress update has failed to complete - please attempt the update again now.

My normal recommendations are to:

1. Deactivate all Plugins before upgrading
2. Install the WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin & use it instead

One of those to usually works, but in this case she was stuck.

So after a bit of research, I found that WordPress creates a file called .maintenance. This is the file that puts WordPress into maintenance mode. “Maintenance mode” keeps your blog visitors from seeing all the nastiness and broken pages when you run an upgrade.

This file sometimes may not get deleted properly which forces that message to display in your Admin screen.

To remedy this, simply log into your FTP, go to the root, or the base directory where you installed WordPress. Locate the file named .maintenance and delete it.

Log back into your WordPress admin & everything should be fine.

This should take care of it. If not, I really really hope you backed up your site before upgrading!
photo credit: Tweek