VA Recipes Journal – week #1

Tasks Accomplished

Setup the blog

The WordPress install is up and running with a plugin to show a”coming soon” page until I finish the design and content setup. I used the “Ultimate Coming Soon Page” plugin, which was quick & easy to setup. Might look into something that integrates with a proper mailing list management tool, as it only supports signing up for updates via feedburner.

Setup Clicky & Feedburner
All done. Public Clicky dashboard is available here. Not much there to see just yet. I guess I missed one of my goals for this weeks, still haven’t setup Google Analytics.

Posting schedule

After thinking about how much I can commit to and realistically deliver I have decided to post twice a week on Mondays and Wednesdays (that’s after the site goes live :)).

Designed a logo

This was not planned for this week, but I threw a quick draft together so I can make some headway with the design next week. It wasn’t actually “quick” – ended up spending half my weekend on this, but seemed to be one of those necessary evils… I think the logo evolution might be an interesting post on it’s own, so will probably draft one later

Lessons Learned

I spend too much time playing around with the logo and the mascot graphics. Need to focus more on my specific goals next time. I’m one of those easily distracted people, that once get stuck on a task, for one thing try to get it perfect, and then end up around 5am looking puzzled where did the night go – I was just going to tweak this one thing…

Also probably should spend more time filling out this post through out the week (especially the lessons learned part…), rather than do a last minute update like this.

Finances & Stats

Visitors: 0

Subscribers: 0

Income: £0

Expenses:  £23.98

• Domain names: £23.98
• Hosting: £0 (I already have a server for my other sites, so for now this projects doesn’t cost me anything extra)

Profit up to date: -£23.98

Tasks Planned

• Finish creating a site mascot
• Create a nicer “coming soon” page
• Research and install plugins for wordpress
• Setup an aweber account