Read the full episode transcript below:

00:28 Tim Strifler: Hey everyone welcome to another episode of WP The Podcast i’m Tim Strifler my co-host David Blackmon is still traveling uh it’s a common theme the last few episodes and so he isn’t having the internet or the time that he’s uh thought he was going to have during his travels, and so i’m doing some additional recording without him. So today we were talking about our biggest mistakes we made when we were new to web design. And this is a topic that we actually discussed on a full webinar me and Corey Jenkins, and so what i’m gonna do is i’m gonna talk about a couple of those mistakes that we talked about the webinar, and then i’m gonna point you and link you to the training where you can actually watch the entire webinars about. I think it was about 90 minutes long. And so you’ll hear from from myself and my colleague Corey as we discussed and go through uh those different uh mistakes that we made. And so the first one i want to talk about is, um this was one of mine. So i’m going to be talking about mine, Corey had his in the presentation too. So the first one i want to talk about is i use to kind of employ the just in time learning method instead of learning how to build websites the proper way. So when i was just starting out i didn’t take an online course i wish i would have i didn’t study in school or anything like that, so i was learning as i was going along and i’m sure a lot of people can relate to this too. And so um i call that just in time learning because it was like i would get to a point and i’d get stuck trying to figure something out, so i would google it, right? And i’d find an article then or i find a video on youtube or i’d find a forum post or someone asked a similar question and um then i would find that solution. Then it would you know it would get me over that hump where i got stuck and then i keep going along you know building the side doing this doing that and then i would get stuck again. And then i would go and google it and figure it out. So it was just in time right? And the problem with that is i didn’t know what i didn’t know. Right so there was a lot of things that i did wrong and i wasted time doing and had to circle back to later because i didn’t know what i didn’t know, and so even though it might have worked in the moment it wasn’t the right way to do it and then also it was like i had all these learning gaps, right where i learned this and then i learned this but i didn’t learn all the stuff in between because i didn’t actually need it in that initial moment. So there’s all these learning gaps and stuff and so um rather than learning kind of in a systematic way where it takes you from start to finish through you know the process of okay here’s the core languages, you don’t need to really learn how to write code, but you need to learn what they are and how they work, you need to learn css, you need to understand how WordPress works, you need to understand you know how this is done and that sort of thing and blah blah blah. And so because of that i missed a lot that ended up taking me more time overall than if i were to just take a course and learn it kind of step by step in a systematic way. So that was the the first mistake that we discussed on the training, and so you can uh learn more about that as well and and hear kind of some additional stories about that. Now the second thing that i talked about in this training was i used cheap hosting and so that got hacked and costed me time and money and frustration to fix instead of me just taking the time to learn what proper hosting is and why i needed it. And so i actually got hacked not once but twice on cheap hosting and um i’m not going to say the name of the hosting company here publicly, but yeah basically even though i did everything right, even though i locked down my site,  i was using all the latest and greatest tricks and tips for securing my site, i still got hacked because i was on cheap shared hosting where they were cramming on hundreds of websites if not more onto the same server. And other sites on that server were not doing what they’re supposed to be doing, and they got hacked and it was what what they call a sideways hack because it happens across different sites. So they’re different installs but because it’s the same server the server is infected all the sites on the server get infected too and so that happened once and i was like okay well that was probably a fluke, so i ended up creating a completely separate account with the same host and then rebuilt uh or my migrated my site. So the first time i had to get it clean i used um site lock and it was a lot of money for them to clean it and then i migrated to the new site and stuff, and within a couple of months the same thing happened again completely different server sideways hack again, like it looked different it manifested differently it wasn’t the same thing. I’ve told the story before so i was like well how do you know you didn’t just bring the hack with you you brought malware with you it’s like well no i got it cleaned it was verified it was cleaned by professionals and then it was a totally different type of pack, totally different. So yeah it was because of the same crappy hosting that wasn’t doing anything to secure their clients sites and make sure their clients don’t get hacked. And so even though i did everything right they screwed up and didn’t secure the server so my site got hacked and it wasted so much my time and money because i had to pay to get it fixed, so after that it was like all right we’re done and so i moved over to WP Engine which i’ve talked about a lot, and i’ve had a great experience. Ever since WP Engine costs a lot more in terms of the monthly fees we actually end up saving a lot of money because you’re not only having to deal with hacks or deal with sites going down but you also end up saving money, because you don’t need to spend uh a lot of money on security plug-ins extra caching plug-ins this that you know, whatever. And they have all that stuff built in which is awesome. So that is it for this episode. So we went through about 10 different mistakes that we made when we were new to the web design journey and so um there is a link in the show notes for this episode where we where you can put in your name and email and you can get access to the replay of this webinar that me and Corey Jenkins went through. So definitely check it out um would love to hear your thoughts on if any of these you can relate to and if it made sense, and if you liked it and if there’s anything um mistakes that you made uh that were different that you learned from and that you’d like to share. Uh let us know um so that is it for this episode, tune in tomorrow and we are discussing um my bookkeeping process, and why i don’t outsource bookkeeping. So until then take care bye-bye

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