TastyTrixie.com

Posts Tagged ‘wordpress’

After eight years of hearing that my blog is most people’s (even some members’) favorite part of my site, I decided to make it Stop-Number-One when you hit TastyTrixie.com, totally integrating it into the free area of my site and making it the focus. Instead of trying to create a structure and design out of thin air for all of my content, I’m (finally) taking advantage of awesome Wordpress tools that are already out there so I can focus on things I really ENJOY doing, instead of busting my brain and ass making half-assed, unworkable, amateur designs.

I’m posting it up before it’s totally done because I’m afraid if I don’t get it up NOW, I won’t want to post any new entries in my old blog (which will stay up as archives so that links will stay active/won’t break/die).

Yes, I’m losing some of the uniqueness of my old homemade designs, but I’d rather have my work be organized and accessible. Also, I’m sick of porn industry people making fun of my wacky attempts at design (but not so wacky that people didn’t like them and other webgirls even COPIED them, like, almost exactly).

Most importantly, I can feel proud to promote my site and blog again. For years now everything here has been outdated and it felt too depressing and large for me to fix it (especially not wanting to throw time and energy into something that would quickly become outdated and have to do it all over again). I didn’t even *want* people to come to my site, it looked so outdated and confusing with old pictures misrepresenting my current age and body type, old text misrepresenting my girlfriend and our relationship, etc. As a result, I have less traffic and not enough signups (people who pay to see the porn in my members-only area). Now I can get happy about inviting people to come here again. AND spend more time blogging instead of worrying about how stupid my blog LOOKED.

To Do:

• My links are messed up & I still need to add a lot more of them, more widgets, etc.
• TONS more pages to write/add/pornify & convert from old site stuff
• make a new free video sample
• Fix the template so people can comment on PAGES in addition to posts.

Concerns:

• Will my site look generic and fake now? Too much like other blogs?
• Will I feel pressure to always make the most recent post AWESOME since it’s the first impression people will have, and a) not post enough for fear of not being AWESOME enough, b) veer away from posting anything mundane and/or “too” honest/”negative” about things, and/or c) wind up being too fakey/hyper-pornographic in an ultimately counterproductive attempt to reel in sales?
• Wordpress is great and all, but it does introduce a lot more complexity, headaches & needs for babysitting.
• Will people looking for porn who are accustomed to a certain “tour” design for personality sites GET that this IS also a porn site? Or will they just be like, “oh, blog, generic, nothing naked to see here . . . nothing more to get beyond this boring, unoriginal template and all of these annoying WORDS”?
• -OR- will people think, “awesome! another free porn blog where everything is free free free and all I do is skim through it for the free free free pussy pics stolen from other sites that I totally don’t care about and have no intention of supporting!”? In other words, have all the free porn blogs shaped people’s responses to seeing a sex blog so that they view it in a totally depersonalized, ENTIRELY freeloading pic-trader way? Will they think I’m just some hobbyist webmaster/blogger dude/chick sitting here distributing a bunch of free shit?
• Is it too overwhelming? Too bright? Too RED?
• Is it loading too slow because there are too many dynamic elements?
• Do I really want Twitter fucking my whole layout & load time up when it’s crapped out?
• What about nudity on the front page? If I hide the pornyiest stuff behind cuts (where you have to click for “more”) and on clearly-labeled pages, will it be TOO hidden for people with urgent jacking needs and again they just won’t get that there’s more going on here than billions of words?

Awesome things:

• blends in well with my members-only area
• the search function actually WORKS
• Recognizable, USEFUL navigational structure: good for visitors and VERY GOOD for my brain – a huge relief; it’s like finally having a closet with hangers and drawers and shelves when all I had before was a giant box on the floor to throw my clothes into. Structure is what my brain needs to have the freedom to be creative without so much chaos.
• I don’t need to completely revamp everything whenever I want to add something new
• lots of other boring (on the outside) things like many easy ways to customize shit, use cool plugins, better search engine optimization, “cuts” (if I have a long post I can hide some behind the “more” link), etc.
• switching to wordpress and really figuring out how to make the most of it (especially now that it’s come so far) makes all of our other smaller porn & special interest blog projects more doable AND makes part of our revamps of SpyOnUs.com and Trixie.com more manageable.
• I can stop fretting about having to redesign my site – I’m so glad it’s not hanging over my head anymore like a giant ominous sandbag of timesuck inevitably ending in mediocre results
• it should stand the test of time / be functional and good-looking for a few years, I hope
• in the process of looking for make-do free wordpress templates I found this fairly-rad software, Artisteer, to make our own (which is what I used to create this theme).

Need/hope to fix:

• embedded videos in old posts aren’t showing up
• tags & categories are all fucked up (and most REALLY old posts don’t have them at all, nor do they all have titles)
• old comments are here and visible if you click on the post pages, but they’re not indicated in the footer’s comment count
• not entirely sure ALL of my old posts came over; need to check on that
• some formatting is messed up on old posts (pics not centered, blockquotes look fucked up . . . not a big deal, but it would be nice to fix it)
• need to add a plugin to help filter out spam comments
• I need to finally make sure I understand how to set up cron jobs so I can have posts queued up to post automatically.

Eventually:

• I’d like to have someone customize a layout that’s more original / exclusive . . . unless, of course, this works so well there’s no need to

This redesign is about four years overdue and I would LOVE to sit here and gripe about more technical matters that my fellow bloggers and webwhores could relate to, but I’m trying not to continue whining about how MOTHERFUCKING TIME CONSUMING AND BORING AND FRUSTRATING this process has been. Oops. Oh wait, AND SO NOT SEXY!!! Instead I’m going to enjoy being fifty steps closer to being happy with my site and celebrate having a plan and tools for revamping the rest of our outdated sites. I am also inches from promising myself to never fully rely only on ourselves to design anything important AGAIN. I like coming up with SOME ideas, but we don’t have the time or know-how to do EVERYTHING. I am really desperate to have more time to fuck and actually MAKE content instead of working on the boring cosmetic issues of how we present and organize and promote it.

So! What do you think?