Do you ever go to do one task and end up unearthing about a hundred more tasks you have to do during the process?

I renewed my WordPress website for the next three years, so I spent most of my day today trying to get it set up so that it looks a bit more professional. I’ve been childishly ignoring the voice of my coach in the back of my head telling us, You don’t need a website to start.

But I think I have a number of things I can put into an online shop and content IS part of what we’re supposed to do so I feel like this is an okay first step. I know it’s best practice to have your own website to maximize the amount of money you retain from a sale and to build a subscriber list that you own since most social media sites heavily discourage that.

So this morning I started out trying to figure out how to get my new theme set up so that it looked the way I wanted it. I was working on it yesterday too actually. I chose to switch to the Shapely theme because it looked like it would allow me to make the types of pages I wanted to.

The first problem I encountered was the home page. I did not start by reading the welcome documentation–normally I would never, but WordPress is always a little bit of a labyrinth. So I spent a bunch of time trying to edit the page to resemble the Wix site I have that I like the layout of and then discovered it didn’t look like that on the live site.

So I dove into trying to figure out that, which took a bit, and during that process I realized I needed to get some of the art I needed onto my computer, create and make a gif to emulate this video on my Wix site (the video was not just autoplaying on a loop like I wanted it to, it was more like a video player):

So I had to figure out where the original video was, make it short enough and small enough to download and reupload to a site where I could convert the video to a gif (I ended up using Canva, both to convert it to a gif and to crop it because I couldn’t figure out how to crop the video in iMovie), and then got it finally uploaded into WordPress and looking vaguely similar:

But that was one whole side quest. Then I realized the email subscription form I had created should be changed out for my Kit subscriber form since I want to get started using that. That led to discovering I needed to set up a subdomain to connect Kit to WordPress, which led to an advanced level of Google searching (I finally resorted to AI, which I hate, but when trying to solve a how-to problem, especially with tech it is really useful) for how to create a subdomain. During that process, I realized I no longer remembered who my domain host was, so I had to figure that out (turns out it’s WordPress, which was part of what was complicating my Googling. Most of the help articles were for externally hosted domains.

But finally AI clued me in that I just had to add the DNS records from Kit and that was it! Hours of futzing and research to complete the task in under 5 minutes. God, the learning curve is a pain.

Anyway, after I got that connected, I also realized I needed to set up Kit the rest of the way and send my first email–my email subscribers will be 2 days behind since I only just remembered Kit exists and I should send my writing there as well. So I finished setting up Kit whilst also becoming aware that I needed to set up my Substack fully as well. So I did that.

I’m pretty sure there were several other mini side quests in there, but it’s late and I’m tired so I’m going to leave it at broad strokes. Have you ever gone to complete one task and ended up with 3508032 other new tasks?

Note to self: Write a how-to article on any or all of these things.

Thanks for reading!