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How Tidy Is Your Blog? 6 Tips for Tossin’ the Trash

November 3rd, 2007 Posted by Chanya

I love the BBC America television show “How Clean Is Your House?”  In each episode two very proper British ladies visit homes that, upon first glance, seem to be beyond repair and redemption.  We’re talking filthy.  The two hostesses chat a bit with the home owners (who I tend to feel sorry for) and then bring in a kick-butt cleaning crew.  The results are close to miraculous.

We can apply some of the same principles to our blogs:

1. Get Rid of Clutter:  clutter represents a big turnoff for readers.  When I visit a site that’s got animated gifs and so many ads it’s difficult to read the posts it’s rare that I hang around for more than a few seconds. You’ve got to have some rockin’ content to get me to stay.  Even so, the onscreen clutter may deter me from ever returning.  Those of you with 3-column designs need to be especially careful because you have more places for the eyes to wander.  You want your design to be clean and functional.  Toss out the extra crap.

2.  Perform regular maintenance: set aside some time to regularly check for broken links.   Or use an automated tool that does this for you.  Also, I strongly recommend that you go through your older posts to make sure they still display properly.  I used to think this was unnecessary  - after all, you haven’t changed your posts since they were originally published right?  Well, a few weeks ago I looked at an older post of mine and realized that one of graphics was no longer displaying.  Not sure why, but I had to go through the process of re-loading the graphic from the original file in order to fix the problem.  I never would have discovered this if I hadn’t engaged in some quality control maintenance.

3.  Do Some Dusting: use a site diagnostics tool like StatCounter or Google Analytics to review the referring links for your posts (i.e., find out where your readers are coming from).  If you have Digg or Reddit links or widgets on your site but rarely get visits through those sites you might want to consider removing them because they’re obviously not generating much traffic.  Although I check my stats daily (okay, I’m obsessed with checking my stats) I try to perform a comprehensive review every few weeks.

4.  Clean Your Closets:  check through your Recent Posts section if you have one.  Do you need to keep a link to every post you’ve published?  Remember, the keyword here is “recent.”  I personally don’t think a Recent Posts list should include more than 8-10 items, if that many.

5.  Know When to Toss “Sentimental” Items: During the transition from my old site to this one I noticed that I had several links in my blogroll simply because the blog owners were among the first people to comment about my old site when it was first created.  I asked myself: are their blogs really relevant to my site anymore?  Would I recommend their site to other newbie bloggers?  For some sites the answer was a firm YES.  For others . . . um, NO.

Don’t fall into this trap like I did.  It’s better to link to a few sites with great content than to have a blogroll so long it forces your readers to use the scroll bar.  When I come across really lengthy blogrolls I simply keep going.  I don’t have time to read through that many links.

6.  If Necessary, Be Ruthless:  When I first set up my blog (at the old site) I was told that a cardinal rule of blogging was “Never Delete Any of Your Posts.”

As with most things, blogs evolve over time.  I started this blog a few months ago with the sole purpose of promoting my jewelry.  Period.  After 2 months I realized that most of my posts fell into the “random thoughts” and “blog tips” category.  I also realized there was a reason for that: it’s what I liked writing about.  So, did I keep the jewelry-related posts simply because that’s what we’re supposed to do?  Sorry, no.  I kicked them to the curb and never looked back.

Digg this:  Your home says something about you as a person, right?  So too does your blog. So spend some time cleaning up the clutter and tossin’ the trash.  Put on your Sunday best - company’s comin’!