My HR Project consists of 36 monthly ticks with no exact plans for each one. Yup, I have my three-year plan to design and develop an exceptional Human Resources Management website. Time flies and the first tick is over; luckily other 35 ticks are still in the queue.
Most projects are about a long period of planning, and an even more extended period of implementing. I have chosen the agile approach. I just started to implement my solution from scratch. So, here comes the summary of the first tick. Let us have a look at my successes and failures.
Well, the worst message first. My ratio of actuals achieved vs. plan was at 19%. On the other hand, the website development and traffic is not linear. You have to be patient to see any significant traffic coming from search engines.
Still, I missed my goals and objectives significantly. On the other hand, there was an exciting development in January.
Also, here comes the best message. I did not get bored for a second (kidding, kidding). I promise that I will go on because the show does not end.
Change of the Hosting Provider
The content is the king, and the speed is the queen. It is the number one rule of the Internet, and this is how Google works. You have to deliver great content at high speed. Totally pity, my site was doing good on desktops. However, it was extremely slow on smartphones.
I made a difficult decision. I changed my hosting provider because the slow site is a dead site. Knowing that was the principal reason I have moved my pages because with the current hosting company I was unable to shorten the mobile loading time.
As a summary, I was a happy customer of Dreamhost for many years. Till the moment when a few of my websites were hacked. The malicious script added thousands of Japanese fashion pages to my sites (without my consent).
Nothing helped. Deleting and moving the copy from backups helped just for several days. I had to shut down my websites. Also, it made me also investigate other issues. I discovered that the speed of the site was slow.
So, I moved my HR Project to WPEngine. They are WordPress specialists, and they are in the business for years. As always, there are many reviews, most of them are highly positive, and a few ones are somewhat negative. So far, the site is speedy.
On the other hand, its interface is not intuitive. For example, the setting of SSL and other security features was painful.
I have no opinion so far, but I believe I will be satisfied with the service, and Google will like the speed of my website.
Copying the content from old websites
Well, this was the most boring activity by far, and it will continue to be the dullest moments of my days. So far, I did not discover any technique to make it easy and quick. I move articles from old websites to this one. I do not make any changes or rewriting right now; I want to revise and change the content later. However, it is slow and boring. I have to find a way how to make it funnier.
Copying page by page is slow, and I can make many mistakes and errors. On the other hand, I decided to use the old content as much as possible. Writing the same stuff, again and again, kills my creativity. That is why I will continue through February to have all done by the end of March.
Surprisingly, I can find a lot of my old content on hard drives and online website archives. Still, I assure myself every day, that Atom is the best text editor, I know at the moment.
Keyword Research and Search Results Development
I still remember how I started my first website back in 2007. Within days, Google was indexing the site fast. The first search results were coming in a couple of weeks from posting a new page.
Nowadays, Google is lazy, and it does not show any pages in search results immediately. Google loves the old content. The only way how to succeed is being patient.
In January, there was almost no change in search engine traffic. No Google, no Bing, no DuckDuckGo. The traffic coming from search engines is random, and there is no trend visible.
I do not plan any SEO investment yet. Its time will come next year (if everything goes according to the plan). Right now, I would waste resources and money.
I will focus on SEO optimization when I know that the site has enough content that should be optimized and promoted. Right now, I would not gain anything. The website is empty, and I need to focus on content development.
Traffic Sources
My HR Project cannot rely on a single source of traffic. Nor Google or Facebook can be taken as sustainable sources of steady site traffic. There can be a dramatic shift in people´s behavior, and my project would be lost.
Pinterest is a surprising winner. I expected that Facebook would deliver most visitors (and it did). However, Pinterest is a SURPRISING second star. In my eyes, Pinterest was a kind of a dead social media. It is not true; it works for specific audiences.
For sure, Twitter does not work for me. I have about a thousand followers, and I get almost no traffic coming from the world of instant messages.