I have been hoping to make my website look more professional by adding a unified look to the photos. My first idea was to get some royalty-free stock photos and then add some Lightroom presets to them.

However, I noticed that most of the photos available are already so heavily edited that adding more presets to them doesn’t seem to to do the trick. Apparently photographers don’t wanna sell RAW photos in general?

I then looked into different websites where you can buy licenses. I noticed that Getty actually has such nicely edited photos that I wouldn’t need to do anything with then. However, they are prohibitively expensive for a small site like mine.

I then looked into the idea of buying photos from models directly. Well, now I would have to get a release from both the model and the photographer. If they were the same person, this might be feasible. However, most of these photos look… ugly.

In an optimal world what I would do is take maybe five of my money pages and then rotate the photo on it and see if it makes a noticeable difference what type of a photo I got.

I had a super nice conversation today with the people at WP Engine. The reason I am looking for a managed hosting solution is that I really want to make my site robust and fast.

This will not be cheap by any means. However, if their speed it at least half as good as I hope, the added security will be worth it.

There is no way I wanna go back to the hell that is shared hosting with all its issues. I wanna focus on my users, not on taking care of hosting.

One of the things I have been trying to solve today has been how to make my tables responsive. I will have a *lot* of tables on my site.

My solution for this problem is going to be the plugin Ninja Tables. Not only will this solve my response issues, it will also help me in managing some of the data better.

Choosing a WordPress theme isn’t about the looks for me. I am really trying to find a theme that would:

• allow me to do what I want to do
• be fast
• help me develop the site further

Then there is the whole question of what to build and how. I think I should first go with the spaghetti solution and then try and find a pro to help me.

However, I would already like to make the choice on a page builder. Elementor and Gutenberg seem like good options.

As for themes, they go hand in hand with the page builders, more or less.

For some reason, I think I would like to look at features needed, then choose the “tech stack” for those features and only then look at the graphics.

One specific issue I have had with WordPress is that it is sometimes really difficult to choose how to implement a certain content element on the site.

A good example is a table of contents.

There are so many options on how to do it:

• Use a plugin
• Use a Gutenberg block
• Make it manually on each page
• Implement it hardcoded with PHP
• Build something in functions.php that you can call

You could also choose a theme where this comes as a built-in option.

The problem is that when I am designing the features of my site, depending on the previous dependencies (like my choice of theme), building something like this might be prohibitively expensive or cost next to nothing.

If I choose the wrong option, my site speed will go down significantly.

The way I think I will do this is that I will just bolt on all of the functionality I need. I think of this like building an electric car prototype with store picked parts.

Then, after the site has gained traction, I will flatten all this down to increase site speed. Basically, using purpose-built components.

I have had a lot of issues in the last couple of years with my website audience. I haven’t really been able to put my finger on it.

The problem has been that somehow my website has attracted a lot of “wrong type of people”. Somehow I ended up listening to their criticism and catering to their needs. While doing this, I simultaneously lost my core.

I tried to alleviate by just looking at behaviour of the people. However, when giving tasks to content writers this does not work. The text will be really bland and lack soul.

I tried to think of this through demographics at first. I looked at stuff like:

• age
• sex
• income level
• education level
• profession / lack of it

This really did not do it.

I thought about this long and hard and decided I have to look at this from the point of view of etnography and phenomenology. Finally when I did this, was I able to choose my audience better.

I also noticed that for my chosen tribe, a lot of the words have different meaning due to the values, drivers and assumptions these people have about how the world operates.

I believe this gives a really interesting perspective to the way I look at keywords. Depending on the tribe this person belongs to, a keyword might have a completely connotation and even meaning. Now it is only about picking the keywords but understanding that with my keyword selection I can drive the correct audience towards my site, too.

(And yes, I have read my Foucault and Skeggs)

I have been struggling for the last couple of days with getting a new WordPress theme installed on my site.

The main issue I always bump into is that it is really difficult to find someone who can adjust my design wishes to facts on the ground.

For example, I would like to show a description for each category as text. The issues are:

• Should be this done by coding it with PHP on category page?
• Should I pick a theme framework where this is a feature (such as Genesis)?
• Should I try to find a plugin that does this for me?

If I use custom PHP, what happens with an update? If I use a theme framework, does it allow it for me to adjust it the way I want? If I use a plugin, does / will it have security holes in the future and will it be kept up to date?

Also, don’t even get me started on trying to find a designer for the theme with a good grasp on typography.

I finished today with some magic that is TF-IDF.

I also had some good discussions regarding some more detailed stuff like valuation of certain types of links, passage ranking vs. headings and I also got into arguments when it came to how much influencers should be paid.

Also found out that some of my old documents have been getting a lot of love since I wrote them years ago.

One of the SEO things I noticed I need to do is to promote some of my blog posts to pages. My logic here is that blog posts are by definition news-like content. If a blog post gets evergreen properties and needs updating, I will bump up to page status.

Blog posts will only be updated for broken links. They might also get a link to a newer, more updated content.

Pages will however be constantly updated based on their decay time.

I am trying to make a little better keyword analysis process. In order to do this, I am reorganizing the phases a bit.

Here are the phases:

1. Get the keyword candidates. Pick one for analysis.
2. Analyze competition for this keyword.
3. Check out the different intents and strategies for ranking on this keyword. Make semantic analysis.
4. Pick the topic, intent, keywords and secondary keywords.
5. Find the best resources and data and write in fragments. This is especially important now with passage ranking.

When this is done, we need to monitor the keyword for:

1. Ranking and traffic
2. Ranking and traffic decay
3. Changes in competitor content

This should do it.