ausworkshop

Well, I can’t quite believe it but I think I fixed it.

I simply went into the template for the products/posts page and although I have no idea what I’m doing I simply added this.

<div class=”outer_wrap”>

Above the line <div class=”container”>

YAY!!!! I think I fixed it!!!

I have no idea why that line wasn’t in there, I noticed it was in the pages template so I just copied it over into the other template file. Winging it and Winning!

Sometimes you just gotta try things until you get it! And keep your fingers crossed the whole time. I’ve been searching for answers for hours and lucky I didn’t try any of the other complex solutions I read about. It seemed to just need this one line of code added in.

Thanks, I’ve looked at the wayback machine before, it’s always good to see how the website has evolved over time and look back at all my silly attempts at SEO before I’d even heard the words SEO! I’m really surprised I wasn’t penalized for keyword stuffing, especially when you see how much text I had on my home page, even a huge chunk of text down the bottom just for SEO (no-one would actually read it all). The thing is it worked! For 12 years, and was still working great even after Panda etc, I used to get my homepage AND my wooden signs page in the top two positions for simple keywords like wooden signs or any similar keyword. I still do ok for my pages but I haven’t seen my homepage up there since I had the URL change problems, even now that the redirects are in place it never came back up. I felt a bit guilty about taking up two top positions at once anyway so all good.

The good news is my internal server error is now fixed.
I had a brief email from them this morning. They have been resetting my Apache server (4 times now) each time it happened. Turns out it was the plugin for the redirects causing problems with the security cert plugin so they have both been disabled and he hard coded it instead, so hopefully that will stop happening now. But I think it means I can’t use the redirect plugin anymore, hopefully they were all ok, I did notice some seemed to be wrong, I added in one that was not working but I thought I better not change the one that seemed wrong in case it was there for a reason. I also have a whole lot of 302’s but hopefully who ever set them up knows what they are doing. I would have thought a 301 would be used for some of them.

I’m still having the problems with not being able to edit or fix the link on my home page, (wooden signs link on left hand side when you scroll down a bit) hover over and you will see the problem with the doubled up domain.
And also the links below my blog which look the same but are actually different URL’s that take you through to the original /products page that I can no longer see or edit I only had them briefly when the site first launched.
I stopped using the /products/ just to shorted the URL and to make the page URL same as my original 12yo URL’s. Perhaps I should have just redirected to these newer /products/ URL’s instead?
One of the redirects was for /products/Wooden_Signs.php to go to the new one, but I don’t think I ever had that URL, only had /products/wooden-signs.html briefly, the redirect for that seems to work ok. my original oldest URL should be the same as what I’m using now https://handcraftedtimber.com/Wooden_Signs.php
But my wooden boxes page doesn’t have the .php on the end but I’m hoping the redirect I put in place recently for that old one is still going through to the new in the best way. I’m not sure why they did it that way with one page having my .php at the end like it should to match my old but the other wooden boxes page they left it off.

Thanks for your time, I’ll get it all figured out in the end, just hard to know what’s going on or why the people who built my site have done things and if they are correct.

Would the redirects they put in have been transferred over with my site and files to the new guy or would he have had to put them in again manually?

Thanks j09 for the reply and advice. As of a few hours ago my website has an internal server error so that is why no one can see it anymore. I now have no idea how to fix that either or if it’s even in my control (or my fault). I’ve contacted my new developer/host and waiting for a reply to that email and some others I’ve sent over the past few days.

I fully understand where you are coming from but most of what you typed I already knew, I did do a lot of research into all this over a year ago before I decided to move to WordPress in the first place.

It’s a long story but basically I had to get my site out of the new Godaddy website builder V6, they were unable to do 301 redirects, when you ‘upgrade’ to the new builder there is no way to keep your old URL’s the same. .php became .html, and my old pages were with an underscore, the new builder only allows dashes. For this reason alone I lost all my old traffic and my website went 404 all over the place, was removed from the index and I was left panicing and getting no help from Godaddy as they don’t allow access to the .htaccess or root directory within the builder.

Until then I had a great website in terms of SEO (top positions for my pages AND my homepage, even AFTER Panda, but it was just looking a bit old and I thought the new Godaddy builder was a good way to go (because it had a new option to make it mobile friendly). This was before I realised my URL change (not domain) was going to cause so much hassle. I would have gone back to the old builder but the time had passed and all those old pages had been deleted by then.
I was forced to start a whole new site in WP mainly because I urgently needed those redirects in place.
I started looking at doing it all myself, was advised numerous times that I really should hire a professional as this online business has become my only source of income, at the time I had no money coming in anymore and could only afford to have a budget site created but was told I would be able to have full control over it etc…

Anyway the thing is I have since moved it all to a new host and local website developer business (whatever you want to call them) after doing even more research and I am happy with what they have done, don’t get me wrong I am not having a go at them or WP or anything else. I realise I have wasted my money and now I need to learn it all myself anyway because that seems to be the only way to have the control I think I need with WP. But all this doesn’t really help solve my problems, as far as I know I should now have full administrator access because that is one of the first things I checked when I moved it all over a few weeks ago. I’m hoping they will be able to fix it but at this stage I don’t even know if they are working on it, the only response I had about the problems I’m having is that they don’t know. I do now have access to all the plugins and things I never had access to before so I am one step closer.

I will get back on here and let you know when my server error has been fixed and then if someone could please take a quick look at it then I would really appreciate it. I can figure things out if pointed in the right direction but so far I just keep going around in circles. I don’t mind having to build the site again myself if I have to but I’m really not confident I will be able to solve problems myself if they occur, especially if I’m told they don’t even know what is going on.

I have often thought about making videos and I am well aware of how popular they are now but at risk of sound selfish ‘other woodworkers’ are not my target audience. In fact it would probably just cause even more competition to pop up against me, why would I want to encourage that? I used to be one of the only woodworkers you could find and buy things from, I had a shopping cart and online store way back in 2004, back then hardly anyone was shopping online here in Australia, the business picked up a few years later and slowly I built it up and focused on making what the customers wanted. Perhaps I should have just taken the easier route and started making woodworking videos instead. It’s worked well for a friend of mine Marc ‘The Wood Whisperer’ The thing is I really don’t like all this tech stuff I only do it because I now have to. I’d rather be in my workshop working with my hands and making things I love and customers want to buy. I don’t have a problem getting work providing my website is working and I don’t want to start filling up my space with tripods, lighting and then spend even more time on the computer trying to navigate all this stuff!

Sorry for the life story but hopefully it helps everyone understand where I’m coming from, the question is where to go now. I can’t afford to just start all over with a whole new business, this has become my life, my young family depend on it. I might seem like a newbie to some but that is only because I’ve never had to worry about all this until I moved to WP. Now I’m almost working full time on tech stuff and emails alone. This doesn’t make me any money.

Thanks, but as I said I don’t have the problem with the gallery not importing anymore (I think because it’s now an old version of WP). I am able to do that now but I have all these notifications saying that I need to update so I’m just ignoring them.

My new problem is probably best directed elsewhere but here goes. For those that like a challenge.

The home page (which I think is static?) cannot be edited from my menu, so I can’t edit the links on my home page. Not the navigation up the top, the links further down the page, there are three of them.

The Wooden Signs link is currently going to https://www.handcraftedtimber.comhttps//handcraftedtimber.com/Wooden_Signs

So it’s doubled up and I can’t edit it. No idea how this happened and it used to be ok.
The navigation up the top is ok, just the link from the pic and text has stuffed up.

The other problem is related to these same links but only when they appear below my blog posts, Click Blog up the top and it will take you through. The links below my posts should be linking just the same as my home page links but they are not, they are linking to old URL’s that I used briefly before changing my URL’s back to my really old ones to try to regain that lost traffic.
The strangest thing is these pages no longer exist but can still be viewed.
The other strange thing is I have put 301 redirects in place so they should be redirecting to my current pages anyway which use the old original URL’s. Instead they take users through to these ‘Phantom’ Pages that I can no longer edit.

I’ve wasted so much time and money on this newest website. I wish I had just left everything alone, it was working fine for 12 years but was looking tired and out of date. It’s so hard to get good advice on how to set up my new website yet keep all that old traffic with redirects. I was told I would be able to have full control and be able to edit everything which I can’t. I have at least managed to move it all to a new host who will allow me to have access to plug ins at least. But if I can’t even edit my own home page I’m pretty disappointed.

Thanks I might give that a try when I have time (if my developer hasn’t tried that already). In the mean time it is now working by going back to a much older version of WordPress. Now I keep getting notified that I need to update but at least I can use the gallery again and make changes to my site. It must have been caused by one of the WP updates. Very frustrating but hey, I’m slowly getting used to that with WP!