Blogging isn’t easy. There I said it.
Getting a blog up and going takes a while if you starting from ground-zero. It took me two years to finally get Pushing Social up to par and I’m still tweaking it. So I won’t insult your intelligence by saying that blogging is easy.
So today, I’m going to engage in a little group therapy. You and I are going to talk about our favorite blogging technical pet peeves. Anything goes as long as it pertains to the process of setting up, growing, or modifying your grow. That means you can’t rail against Congress or the government shut-down or other nonsense.
I’ll get us started:
Coyote ugly WordPress templates. If your template features yellow text on a purple background then your template is Coyote Ugly.
Cookie-cutter WordPress templates. If your homepage has a slider, “Welcome to Company XYZ” and still uses the stock images that came with the theme then you are using a cookie-cutter WordPress template.
Plugins that kill your blog dead dead dead. Especially watch out for any plugin that plays with timthumb. If you see timthumb run like Usain Bolt for the nearest back button. You’ve been warned. (Count yourself lucky, If you have no clue what I’m talking about.
Hard to install social share icons. You know the ones that require a masters degree in CSS and PHP to install.
Blog post update software that spams your list by sending your blog post notification 5 times to the same person. (Don’t laugh it happened to me)
Hackers who think its funny to install malware in their free WordPress Templates.
Email Subscription Optin forms that won’t fit in your sidebar. Since most blog sidebars are 300px wide, I can’t understand why companies haven’t figured out how to make installation easier.
Google. Specifically, I hate that Google hasn’t created an easy to install WordPress plugin that installs Google Analytics so I can stop using janky from shifty developers.
Template developers who creates themes that require a PhD. in nuclear physics to customize.
Template developers who don’t offer email, forum, or phone support. I’ll happily pay $10/more a month to have someone to yell at on the phone.
SEO Plugins that hurt my Google rankings. Yes, they exist. Be careful using plugins from developers who can’t spell or get their own pages ranked in Google.
Blog celebrities who think it’s revolutionary to use “F&ck, Sh*t, and Epic” in their blog headlines. Ok, I guess that was a low blow. I’m from the Will Smith School of being Cool. No Swearing if I can help it.
Janky YouTube Embed codes. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why it’s so hard to create a plugin that shows my YouTube playlist in nice columns and rows. I finally found one after 3 years of looking – yep 3 years yo.
Optin Form Captchas. Yep captchas are ugly (Coyote Ugly if you’re nasty). I hate them but if I don’t use them then I’m cybermugged by…
Optin Form Spammers. One morning I checked my email and saw, to my joy, that I had 20 new people sign-up for my ultra-helpful Blog Marketing Video course. My joy turned to bitter, homicidal, rage when I saw that I each new subscribers all had randomly generated first names and fake gmail addresses. Something beautiful died in me that morning.
Akismet. Actually I love Akismet but I’m a greedy, hard to please, son-of-a gun. My pet peeve is that Akismet can’t help me with #15.
Discus, LiveFyre, and IntenseDebate. I’m going to hate. I’m not proud of it but here I go. I still can’t find a good, verifiable, and sustained benefit to slowing my blog down to a crawl to load these bloated comment plugins. WordPress’ built-in comments works just fine thank you.
Feedburner. Feedburner is a gateway drug to crappy email marketing. Don’t install it on your blog. Get yourself a babysitting gig that pays $20 a month and get yourself a real email marketing solution like Mailchimp or Aweber.
SEO. Listen SEO is a royal tack in the butt. SEO reminds me of a girl I dated in college, hard to understand, hard to please, and likely to dump you for something you didn’t know about. I’ve finally figured out SEO but my God!
The “Text Widget”. Have you played with the WordPress Text Widget? It looks so promising but looks like crap when you actually use it in your sidebar. Frustrating. Here’s a hint, you can use CSS in the Widget. Try it.
Functions.php. In the backwoods of your WordPress blog lives a powerful blogging sorcerer called Functions.php. He can do amazing things to your blog. If you learn his ways you can turn your blog into an intelligent marketing Ferrari. The problem is that Function.php is a cranky cuss that will trash your blog with one wrong move. Most people learn about Function.php the hard way. That sucks.
Are You Stuck?
There’s a method to my madness here. I receive email all the time from people who have minor things wrong with their blog that is keeping them up at nights. These tireless soldiers spend hours on the weekend or late at night trying to make the simplest changes to their blog.
Or worse, some head over to Fiverr, hire a teen from Estonia and end up with a worse mess than they started with. I heard these horror stories so often that I decided to offer a solution called Jumpstart Services.
Jumpstart Services are a growing list of blog tweaks that you can get fixed fast and at a reasonable price. My goal is to eliminate as many blogging pet peeves as I can.
Check out the Jumpstart Services here.
Add to The List
Do you have a blogging Pet Peeve? Let’s get this list to 100.