Morning
Woke up tired again today, always seems to be the way these days. For some reason my legs have been sore even though we haven’t been taking our walks. Skipped out again this morning because I’m just not feeling it. Even though I go to bed at a decent time and give myself lots of time to sleep I’m still waking up feeling groggy. It doesn’t help that my bed kinda sucks.
Delving into my analytics, I still see traffic that appears to be bots. I just wish there was some way to combat it completely. I have added two new filters for more bot traffic, this time “hurricane electric llc” and “xlhost.com inc” are the organizations. It could be worse, the bots could be using our site to bug other people, spam, etc. If only there was some easy way to prevent those bots from even getting to my site instead of having to remove them from my reporting.
Looking at Google Ads I see that it has finished learning my new strategy and it still shows it is budget constrained. I’ve only got a $7/day budget setup and had my max CPC for the ads $.21. I’ve now increased that to $.25 max CPC, and I think over time I’ll keep increasing it more until I find a good balance between cost and CTR. I have switched the strategy back to top of search as well. I’m considering limiting the advertising to only Google searches, but I’ll wait on that for now.
We got another booking through the new system, it seems to be working out really well. It now takes a lot less effort for us to keep the calendar for our villas and lets us go through the billing process with ease. The only thing we’re missing now is the ability to process credit cards automatically but that’s not something we can do in the BVI yet. There are no online credit processors available for this region and we don’t want to have money going through the US unnecessarily.
Not too much to report on Facebook. I feel like we need to put up more content there but there really isn’t much new to report. Maybe just sharing a picture from our Instagram? Yeah, that could work, share the picture from of the Rum Bar at Cooper Island Beach Club. Now I just need a good blurb to put with it.
I did come up with a good idea to hopefully drive a bit more engagement with our Facebook users, polls. I’ve wanted to do one, but now I have some ideas. I really feel like it could help drive engagement to add some kind of poll every week. Ideas so far are favorite day trip spots, beaches, bars, diving spots, and activities.
We went out to work at a couple of the villas. First we stopped by Casa Asombrosa to get the housekeeper working there. Once we got things started there we headed off to Somoya to bring things inside in preparation for hurricane season.
Avada
Once I was back home I bit the bullet and purchased the Avada theme to implement on our site. It’ll take a bit of work to get going on the test site. Hopefully that will help transform our site into something much better than it is now. The install appears it is going to take a while since it’s a fairly large theme (>250mb). Oh, it looks like that’s not the actual install package. It includes a lot of other stuff, the actual Avada theme itself is only 6mb.
Now that I have it installed and activated it’s time to get to work. This is gonna take a bit of time as I get used to the new setup. Avada’s theme customization method is different from what I’m used to. So far things seem pretty straightforward. The more I dig the more little things I find that I’ll want to add and customize though.
Once I was done playing with a few homepage options it was time to dig into my slider options in Slider Revolution. After playing around a bit with one slide I decided it would be great to turn it into a template that I can re-use. Unfortunately that seems to be impossible without paying more for the actual plugin. Even though it is included with Avada you still need to activate it for full features.
After getting a few slides thrown together, the next step is figuring out how to actually add the slider to the home page. Took a little looking, but in Avada you assign the slider to the actual page. After much cajoling I was able to actually get things looking semi-decent on the test site’s home page. Of course, it doesn’t look right on mobile, but I’ll get that figured out eventually too.
Evening
Man, where did the day go? It’s been raining off and on all day. I’ve spent so long playing with Avada that I completely lost track of time. The worst part is that there is still so much more to do when it comes to customizing the test site. And even once that’s completed and looking great, I still have to move it all over to the live site and put in a lot more little tweaks to do it.
I spent a bit of time digging in Minecraft. I’ve got the shaft from the spawn room dug all the way down to the kill chamber. Now I need to work on my design a little bit. I think I’m going to make the floor in the kill chamber some kind of bowl shape. With this design, no matter where I stand I’ll be in range of activating the spawner.
Not long after I ran out to go pick up dinner, pizza from Bath and Turtle. While waiting for it to cook I just had to have a mango martini. As soon as I got home I tucked into a slice and wow! This pizza is damned good. Once I finished eating I headed to my room to watch the last two episodes of Quantico for the season.
Spoiler Warning
The special effects in this show are bad. And the story is just so predictable. I’m guessing that the MI5 chick is a bad guy. Yup, saw that coming! So predictable. Oh God, the writing just gets worse. . .
Even after all that I just can’t resist watching the final episode of the season. They must have completely replaced the writers after season 2. This show just keeps getting worse. No way I’ll watch the next season if it gets another one.
Ugh, just shoot him! You’re the best of the best, you can take him out in one shot before he can react. Or not, just let him get away with the little girl. Come in, obviously he’s going to be expecting you to try to kill him now and is prepared for it! Well I wasn’t expecting dad to be that stupid, but it’s not surprising.
Why does every covert device require a flashing light? Doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose? Oh look, the bad guy got away again. Thankfully it’s over now, presumably for good. After that garbage I need something better from YouTube!
