There are a few main tasks that must be completed before your website can be made operation. As installed, there is a “Coming Soon” page, which prevents anyone from see your website. After completing the three tasks described here, you will turn off the “Coming Soon” page. You can also turn it back on anytime you are doing maintenance.
- Initial Setup and configuring your “customer-admin” user. The “customer-admin” account is YOU, and is always user #2. Do Not delete this user, or we will have to reinstall the website — a number of functions specifically reference user #2.
- Configure your “SEO” (search engine optimization). This helps Google, Bing, and other search engines recognize your site and the content it displays. SEO uses a free plugin (software) from Yoast, but your are welcome to upgrade the plugin to their Premium package (currently $89) for added SEO capability.
- Fix your “Dashboard” warnings. There are two warnings:
– Popups for Divi: leave the warning, sign up for the course, or Close the Warning forever
– Site Health Status: at initialization, there are one or more inactive plugins. If you don’t want to use them, please delete them. Otherwise, learn about them and activate them. - (Optional) Change the website’s General Settins (From the Dashboard, click Settings >> General)
– Site Title
– Tag Line
– Administration Email Address - Change a couple of items on the main page that can’t be automated at the present time. This includes your Email address in the “Contact Form”, and your picture in the bottom most “Email Me Now” module.
- Update your “Social Media” links. These links can be extensive, but the main ones you should be concerned about are Facebook, Twitter, and Google +.
- (Optional) Enable inactive plugins Bloom and Tawk.to chat if you want to add extra capability to your website. Bloom is an opt-in mailing list manager, and Tawk.to is a plugin that adds Live Chat to your site. If you decide to add Tawk.to, you need to create an account at Tawk.to, configure the plugin, and probably also download either the Android Add or the iPhone App; you also need to keep an active browser window open for interactive chats.
- Turn the “Coming Soon” page off.
