Maintenance Planned: Know What to Do

A New Look Coming

I am planning on working on this website sometime this week. Maybe even beginning as early as today. It’s bourne of frustration. So often, when I try to make an improvement, the website’s display misbehaves. Most often this is apparent in, and above, the page menus. I’m sure most of you know what I’m talking about and have seen it yourself. I know where the problem exists (within my theme structure), but don’t know how to fix it! So frustrating. 

My solution is to upload and install a new and different theme. What’s that mean to you? Well, things will look different. It is also more powerful, allowing for many more features. One I’m most excited about is an online store!

via firstinseach.com

It’s not my plan to take the site completely offline. I hope that it remains live throughout. The trade-off is it might look crazy for a while, or sporadically from time-to-time. I suppose if it get’s too confusing (for the reader) it’ll be best to shut er’ down for a bit. 

During this process, that I hope will only take a day or two, I’ll keep everyone updated on Ryan’s Facebook Fan Page.

Facebook Double-Cross

Which reminds me… and pay attention here, folks! Facebook pulled a stunt several months ago that hurts businesses and websites, like ours. It also affects personal Facebook users— like yourself — and big companies. But, a mega company has the financial resources to not even blink at the change. It use to be that anyone who “liked” a Fan Page (or were on your friend list) would get their personal news feeds updated when content was added. Not anymore. Even though I post an update, it only reaches about sixteen percent of registered fans. These are, ironically, the people who regularly visit anyhow. In truth, I do significantly better (at a 45% reach) which means Ryan’s Fan Page is quite a bit more engaging than the average one out there. If Facebook wants me to reach more fans (but not all!), called “Promoted Posts”, it would cost $7 per post. This means it would cost a minimum of $2,500 a year.

That, my friends, is nothing short of being double-crossed!

Obviously, the best solution is to regularly visit this website, ryansrally.org, and screw depending on Facebook. May I suggest adding a bookmark in your browser and visiting daily? Anyhow, this is why it is so important to me when you share the updates I post to Facebook. Actually, it’s critical. You see, I reach sixteen percent of Ryan’s Facebook fans and when you share it, it then extends to sixteen percent of your friends. Did I explain this well enough? No? If you’re interested in understanding this in more depth, I found an article that seems the most unbiased that explains it well.

So, the lesson here is to not rely on Facebook to alert you, via your news feed, that I posted a status update. The only way to do it correctly is to visit Ryan’s Facebook Fan Page on your own. It might also be a good idea to visit some of your friend’s pages that you haven’t heard from in a while to see if you missed anything.