Seriously, if you are not using this at the very least for your BLOGGING then you are truly missing out. And as I will present in the next week or so the next step (which is NOW by the way) is creating full blown websites based upon Wordpress, without ever knowing a word of code!

In fact our woes with developers and designers may be over, as for the large part there usefulness is now redundant.

But for now I want to show you my evolution of Wordpress, this is important because I want to show you that its functionality has evolved massively in just a few short years in to something EVERYONE needs to sit up and listen to, because it really is the platform for creating your own websites right now!

1.I built a BLOG using wordpress.com, the interface was a bit clunky 3 years ago, and it was for the more geeky type of person like me, blogger.com was king in the blogging world as it was really easy to use. What’s interesting blogger.com has not moved on that much, where as Wordpress has moved from geek to something much more user friendly.

2. Someone built a website for me, actually it was my first e-book: The Corporate Athlete Conditioning Handbook. They used wordpress to develop it… I hated it, I hated the interface, I couldn’t change stuff, I was annoyed cos I wasted lots of money. So I rebuilt the website myself using HTML code.

3. However much I hated Wordpress at that time, it peaked my interest in setting it up on my own web servers to play with… SPOT THE NERD!

4. Started finding custom BLOG themes for Wordpress that could make my blogs look a little more appealing from the standard boring themes.

5. Discover the plugin function on Wordpress, which suddenly expanded the functionality of wordpress ten fold, and more importantly was helping to boost the search engine rankings for the sites.

6. Now early in 2009 I really got in to Wordpress and started building BLOGs for myself and custom blogs for myfitgeek clients. EasyFitnessBlogs proved extremely popular and has shown many new people the WordPress way is a better way.

7. Started building websites using WordPress (rather than just BLOGS), more themes started appearing that improved the functionality and ease of set up and changing the look and feel of the site.

8. Autumn 2009, I am now ONLY building websites using Wordpress, everything from BLOGs, Sales Pages(this one here took me just 15 minutes to build!), Product Launch sites, full blown websites for your business , and now…

9. …Membership sites using an incredible piece of software that is a plugin for WordPress.

10. What’s more, the barrier of entry to building these sites has reduced MASSIVELY. For 90% of sites you don’t need to know code or get your head in to FTP. In fact most of the time the most technical bit I do is get someone to build a custom header to fit my site and bingo site is ready to roll!

So why am I tell you all this?

Well, in the next week or so I am going to release a couple of “how to” videos that will show you step by step of how to start your own WordPress based site, and then on Jan 1st I will be launching a new site aimed at helping you get the very best from using Wordpress, Search Engine Optimisation, List Building, Video editing, editing HTML code (if you really want to learn that stuff), where to get the plugins and themes that I use, as well as a step by step process to building your own personal trainer website, WITHOUT EVER NEEDING A DEVELOPER.

To me this is a BIG game changer, and a welcome one too for many fitness professionals who have been bitten by dodgy developers, who waste your time and money.

I’ll also be taking a select few through a special coaching program to get all this stuff done super quick, and get your professional looking site done, ranking high in google, and collecting new leads every day.

The next few weeks are gonna be super exciting, hopefully you are ready for the ride.

Speak soon

Tim

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So out comes the video camera, white board and my cool red t-shirt!

Make sure that once you’ve watched the video, give me your comments below.

Nameservers are the way a domain is pointed to your web host. So when someone types in your domain http://www.yourdomain.com it will look to your web host (where your web site will live) so that it can appear on the web browser.

Watch the video of how to set the nameservers.

Don’t forget to comment on the video here on this BLOG

In this video I show you how to get set up with a host. I use my highly recommended hosting service, StartLogic. If you are in the market for getting a hosting account, watch the video, then click the link below to get set up with StartLogic.

Register With StartLogic Pro Logic Account NOW!

Yes it is an affiliate link and yes I will make a little bit of cash from me recommending you to them, however I use these guys for some of my own hosting and they ROCK! So I have no worries about recommending them and getting a kick back because of it!

Don’t forget to leave your lovely comments below… i really appreciate the feedback on this stuff

Actually some of these guys make me feel like an inadequate geek!

As it happens, you have a lot going for you if you want to compete with a geek fitness professional. All this HTML, FTP, JS voodoo that geeks band about to confuse non-geeks is simply a cover for our own inadequacies!

So what follows is the five steps to successfully getting one up on a geek fitness professsional.

Step 1. Know what you want in a website and stick to your guns. Geeks get too easily distracted by the latest widget, gadget and cool technology. We are pulled off track from what we really wanted our site to do in the first place.

Step 2. Once you get your website built, be happy with the being ignorant to how it works and how to change stuff. Geeks want to fiddle with bits of code to make them “better”. We are too fussy and forget to actually USE the site for its main purpose of marketing and attracting new clients.

Step 3. Have an eye for design. I have the artistic talent of an one eyed wombat, trapped in a paper bag! Techically, geeks are stunning, graphically we suck!

Step 4. Concentrate on providing high quality content that your web site visitors will love you for. Geeks have ZERO attention span (that’s why it took your web-guy months to make that really simple change!). We hate to actually sit and write anything intelligent, witty or vaguely entertaining.

Step 5. Communicate with real people in the real world. Geeks are generally social failures and cannot relate to ordinary non-geeks. You biggest advantage is your charisma and ability to be a real human being on the other side of the internet. Pick up the phone talk and meet your clients in the real world.

I both hate and love the label of being a “geek”.

I am a geek trying to beat off the stigma and personal traits that make it difficult to compete with you!

Rather than let technology and geeks beat you, embrace the technology and use your advantages to beat us.

When I saw his site I felt really sorry for the guy, it was really not very good, and to make matters worse he had no ability to change it!

He was stuck with it!

1500 British Pounds, which at the time, was about 3000 US dollars for a 7 page website that looked C**P and couldn’t be found on by the search engines.

I understand why Paul had gone down this route to get his site built.

FEAR.

Fear of the unknown, fear of not having control, fear of being screwed, fear of ending up with a bad site. The route he took, he thought, was the ’safe’ option.

It was a local business with an impressive portfolio with some big name businesses on their books, it was the ’safe’ option in Paul’s eyes, but it turned out to be not a great choice.

Today, I had an email from a personal trainer wanting my opinion on the quote he had got for his new website… without going in to the details the quote was in the same ballpark as Paul’s site. My advise was simple, say thanks but no thanks, then walk away.

To give you an idea of what sites SHOULD cost, I am currently managing a project for a new website, it is highly complex with many different aspects. Getting a quote for this site in the developed world would stretch in to 5,000 dollars and more!

I am getting the site done for just 1000 dollars.

One of the fears is dealing with developers or businesses that are not within our locality. What we think are large projects are not to expert teams of developers in India, Pakistan or Eastern European countries. They are simply bread and butter projects to these guys.

As Fitness Professionals we should be taking advantage of the best developers in the world at a price that is much more realistic to our budgets…

It is my opinion you are more likely to be screwed by the guy in your high street, rather the Indian developer trying to make a better living for himself and his family.

Outsource, outsource, outsource.

What is your biggest fear with hiring a developer who is not in the same country, or even the same continent as you? Tell me drop me a comment on this BLOG.

Quite scary really…

You’ll be happy to know MyFitGeek is nothing like this at all!

Tim

This morning I was going out of my mind with the 12 days of fitness website, that I am helping Dax Moy with this year…

Something wasn’t right, it displayed fine on FireFox browser but it was all over the place in Internet Explorer…

Anyway, it made think about one of the questions I got last week about Wordpress and using it as the basis for a website. I have had in the past wordpress site for an information product I had.

Whilst the site looked good and and maintained a common look throughout, I did get frustrated by the lack of control I had with it. Despite being a geek, I don’t care to understand EVERY coding language out there and PHP (which Wordpress is based on) is particularly geekie and ugly.

Anyway, before I get off topic, I believe WordPress to be one of the most accessible ways for fitness professionals to create and maintain control over their sites, although it does have its limitations…

To get it set up you DO need a geek to install and set up a few “plugins” to make it work most effectively for you. For example you’ll need a plugin to improve your control over the Search Engine optimisation stuff I talked about in a previous BLOG post

http://myfitgeek.com/blog/33/are-you-focussing-on-the-wrong-search-terms/

You’ll need to have a theme designed and coded by a competent designer/developer, as the themes you get for nothing are in general quite poor.

Saying all that, once it is set up, editing and adding pages as well as maintaining a BLOG is really very simple. Editing pages is just like using a WYSIWYG editor, and now Wordpress can add in things like videos, audio and other media with relative ease.

This BLOG is based on Wordpress… and I am in the process of finding the right developer to design and code the full MyFitGeek website based on Wordpress, hopefully it will look way cooler than this shabby template.

It is not the ultimate solution, but it may be the right solution if you want more control, without the need to get heavy in to the techie coding stuff. Sounds like the ideal solution for many fitness professionals??

Do you have a WordPress web site now, how do you find using it? Is this something you would like to have for your website solution? Leave me a comment below…

I will try and reply to the comments and questions as best as I can in the coming emails. Whatever you do keep the questions coming.

There was a time when doing web stuff was really, really complicated. I mean, there was no such thing as FrontPage or any of the other WYSIWYG editors (What You See Is What You Get). You needed to write code from scratch, there was no templates, or easy to use drag and drop utilities.

Getting your web page up on the net required a IT degree and the ability to write obscure command line stuff… nasty.

Now it is much much easier…

The concept to grasp here is how a website actually appears on the internet. Very simply when you prepare a web page on your computer, no one can see it but you.

Web pages only appear when you place them on a recognised web server. This is like a special computer that is permanently on and can be viewed by anyone at any time.

“Hosting” companies are everywhere, you can pick up a hosting account for as little as a couple of bucks a month. When you do you will be given information of how to access the area where  you place your web pages.

At the risk of being dull and geekie… this is probably the most tedious post this week… This is important information as it will allow you to get back control of your website!!!

Connecting to your area on your server is done through a little  application called an FTP program. Normally you can find FTP applications which will cost you nothing.

Once you have this, and have accessed your server, it is just  like copying files from one part of your hard drive to another, in this case you are copying files from your hard drive to the web server.

That’s it…

As I stated in a previous post, you don’t need to take the  hosting service of your web developer, in fact it is preferable NOT to, so you maintain control over your site.

Many fitness professionals have zero control over their site, which if you have a good developer then this is not an issue, but it can be problematic further down the line.

Whilst I maintain that as fitness professionals we keep our  heads away from this geek stuff, basic concepts like this are fundamental to not being held at gun point by a nerd!