The other day, because I didn’t have enough on my plate, I built a new design site, shut down Sweet Faerie Designs and opened Carrie Loves Design. It took all day, from buying the domain name, hosting, setting up WP, and customizing a design to creating new social media accounts and setting up back-end reporting. It’s a process, and now I’m much more comfortable in what I charge for this service.

Also, I’ve been playing around with advertising this year and haven’t really found exactly what I want, so I switched it up again and started advertising on Sincerely Kinsey and Bubby & Bean. I picked them because I love the niche they’re in – they & their fellow bloggers all have these beautiful blogs with really great posts, and they’re not all about the conferences, what they have, blah, blah, boring – and they were reasonable priced which is a HUGE factor for me.

So, what did it take to get a WordPress site up and running from nothing to tah-dah?

1. Purchase domain name
2. Purchase hosting
3. Install WordPress
4. Install WP theme
5. Customize WP for you
   1. Customize theme → this is where a HUGE chunk of time is dedicated
   2. Create logo/branding/graphics for new site
   3. Install, activate and set-up all of your must-have Plug-Ins → All In One SEO, Comment Luv, Akismet, Faster Image Insert, JetPack, nRelate, Pinterest Pin It Button for Images, etc. I’m also really liking Web Ninja Google Analytics… it’s kind of awesome!
   4. Use anything but the default permalinks
   5. Add About, Contact, and other Pages
   6. Customize a menu/navigation bar
   7. You may or may not need to do this, depending on the type of site you are creating → create & populate Portfolio
6. Make sure things out in the Interwebs are working for you, not against you
   1. Since I offer design services I also needed to update my Etsy shop. And, my friends, Etsy has come a long way baby! They now let you change the name of your shop. Once. But, hey once is better than not-at-all which is what it used to be
   2. Create Facebook page (or, in my case submit request to change name, update email & website info.) → create new profile picture
   3. Create Twitter account (or, change name, update email & website info.) → hopefully use same profile picture as FB → update color scheme
   4. Set up Google Alerts.
   5. Set up Google Analytics → get the code + id.
   6. Set up FeedBurner
   7. Redirect old website URL to new URL

Some other things I learned along the way:

1. Know & Love FileZilla. You’re welcome.
2. Patience is key.
3. Remember to eat and drink water… you’ll start to feel wonky if you don’t.