Websites and blogs are a bit like gardens, hairstyles, and crafting cabinets — they need regular pruning so they don’t get out of hand.
After all, it’s hard to feel good in a place that’s filled with so many weeds, glitter, and stuff that you can’t find your way around.
As a writing professional, I thought it was about time I had a good hard look at my own digital space.
And oh it was bad.
Really bad.
There were more than 900 published posts, plus another 37 draft posts, when I fired up the blogging whipper-snipper in early February — but I’ve trimmed this down to 755. And that didn’t even include the 150 static web pages and products and thousands of images. What a mess!
For the last two months I’ve been busy reviewing the content and today I am proud to say, my website is feeling all bright and salon-shiny new.
Here’s a closer look at what I’ve been up to:
- Revamped the website theme and site structure. I stripped back the menu system to something very simple and believe the new menus are clear and uncomplicated.
- Updated the writing services pages, fee schedule, writing portfolio, and contact forms. I think it’s much easier now for business clients to browse my services and hire me for writing assignments.
- Deleted more than 150 blog posts. My website actually began as a personal blog more than 10 years ago and there were heaps of posts with way too much personal information about my adopted son Jerry and his friends. Anyway, all gone now.
- Removed a whopping 400+ blog categories, tags, and individual web pages. Considering I once wrote an article called Why Categorising Your Blog Posts Helps Your Business, it’s truly embarrassing how bad this was.
- Erased old products, plugins, courses, images, sign-up forms, backlinks, and downloadable PDFs. Goodness, there was so much old stuff back there, it’s amazing I was getting any traffic at all.
Anyway it feels incredible to have actually done this and now it’s all cleaned up I keen to get writing again.
There is so much happening in the world of digital media and online content right now — especially with the growing popularity of AI-writing tools — so there is a lot to talk about.
After being silent for so long, I’m keen to jump back into the conversation. Not as keen however, to publish AI-generated content on my blog (or for clients) — but more about that in my next post.
Till then.
Melxx
My little cat Sunny and I are ready for work. Me writing, him sleeping. He only woke up for the photo. Also I’ll be sharing my reviews for some of the books in that pile in future posts.