Opti­miz­ing your web­site for search engines sounds like a good idea, as most peo­ple still find what they’re look­ing for using a search engine. SEO is as much an art as it is a sci­ence, and the experts are usu­ally not that far above the folks who do com­mon sense things as far as results. This makes it con­fus­ing, and more than a lit­tle intim­i­dat­ing to new folks in the web realm. Let’s talk about how to make sense of it, shall we?

There are sev­eral more plu­g­ins I find indis­pen­si­ble, but these three are the post edit pow­er­house I use to keep things tidy and user friendly. Two of them require API keys, but all are free, like most other Word­Press related plu­g­ins. Give them a shot. I can’t blog with­out them.

We took a few back­end items in this site and made them work together, so there is an under­ly­ing mem­ber­ship (con­ti­nu­ity) com­po­nent, as well as a pay­ment gate­way and newslet­ter func­tion. It has an auto-responder and a few other nifty gad­gets, all on a sim­ple, almost min­i­mal­ist sub­strate. The whole thing involved a great deal of edu­ca­tion so that the client could man­age the site himself.

I did this site for fun, but I still dig it. I want to have more time to update it and put inter­est­ing things on it. The pur­pose of this site is to chron­i­cle my jour­ney toward energy inde­pen­dence. It hap­pens to be pretty green.

I made heavy use of golds, oranges and yel­lows in this design, with reds as accent col­ors. Prob­a­bly the only non-offensive color in the whole mess is the blue text. It’s some­thing to behold. His cur­rent wife­said, “It’s pretty!” when she saw it. What­ever you say, sweety…