When Do You Stop Working On a Website
Ok, so you've got your website up and running, it's been indexed in Google, and it's getting some traffic. How do you know when to stop working on it?
Apart from the obvious answer that maybe you don't stop working on it ever, you stop working on it when it's achieved its goals. What? You don't have a goal for your website? Hmmm… so how are you going to decide what you should be working on? How will you tell whether your website is a success?
Goals are an essential part of any project. They should be set as part of the project planning process really, but at the very least you should have a goal as soon as you're up and running.
You don't have to set complicated goals for your website, you can have one goal and it can be as simple as something like a certain number of visitors per day or a specific amount of income per month.
To be honest, the goal itself doesn't matter nearly as much as having a goal in the first place, because without a clear goal you're just guessing, and that means you'll be all over the place. Read all of When Do You Stop Working On a Website →
Robots.txt WordPress Plugin
This is another one of those handy plugins designed for people like myself, who just want to be able to set something up and then not worry about it again.
What the plugin does
You probably know that when a search engine spider visits your site, one of the first things it does is look for a file called robots.txt which tells it which files and folders it can go and look at. By default, WordPress lets every robot go everywhere. That might be ok for some people, but I prefer to exercise a bit more control over things.
For example, if the robot identifies itself as a bad bot – yes, some of them do – then I don't want it to go anywhere. All it's probably going to do is trawl for email addresses to add to a spam list somewhere. And I don't really want any robots poking their noses into such places as the WordPress admin folder. Control freak? Me? Don't know what you mean…
The solution is to add the names of bad bots to your robots.txt file and disallow them from going anywhere, and add the names of common search engine spiders and specify which locations or files they are allowed to visit. Read all of Robots.txt WordPress Plugin →
Hi there. My name is Peter Coughlin. I am a freelance web developer living in the UK, and at the moment I am specialising in WordPress customisation.