The basic problem with my blog from my point of view is that over the years I have made quite a few small mistakes. I have blogged about things that aren’t interesting either to me or to my audience. I have left up spelling errors and grammatical faux pas. I have written stuff that doesn’t fully reflect what I think, either because my thinking has changed or because I didn’t express myself clearly enough.
None of these things are in themselves all that fatal, and I have low enough standards and expectations that I can live with a bit of imperfection. But over time they sort of accumulate and end up with my not being entirely happy about the blog – and although I only spend about 3 or 4 hours a week on it, it still means that I am spending time on making myself unhappy.
So I have decided to go back over my past posts and re-edit them or delete them. I feel good about that decision and I think I will feel even better when I start implementing it.
But the big thing I am going to do is to redesign the blog to make it uncluttered and hopefully easier to get around. I am planning to remove every element of it that doesn’t generate some value for the reader or for me. So no more ads for stuff I don’t really believe in. No more social media sharing hints and no more auto generated suggested further reading. If a post needs a call to action at the end, I’ll consciously choose to add one. If it doesn’t. I will graciously allow the reader to clear off and do whatever seems like a good idea to them.
The end result hopefully will be a blog that people want to come back to. And if not, well that is fine too.
