Thursday, June 20, 2013

Blog Management - Spring Cleaning Your Blog

A regular clean up of your site is an important part of ongoing blog management. Like most things in life, the cleaner your blog is the better it will work. Consider the golden rule about "attention span" - for your readers it is limited. You don't want them to be distracted by unnecessary and irrelevant information on your web pages. It's a common mistake, but many web bloggers and web developers forget to remove unnecessary content from their sidebars and posts. Today we look at some examples of content you should consider "spring cleaning" from your site.

Remove The Calendar


Calendars are superfluous (love that word) for the vast majority of sites. Unless you actually write on a subject or niche that is time sensitive or your posts are time-bound, there is no real reason to have a calendar on your page.

If your blog is focused on telling the story of a journey or the evolution of an event then the calendar does play a role. It enables readers to track the continuing development and in this case has some merit. If your blog isn't actually focused on anything like this then I would suggest you remove it.

Author Details

In most cases the "About" page on your blog should cover, in sufficient detail, any author information pertaining to your posts. If you are the only author posting on your blog it makes more sense to remove the author details from your pages as your readers are more than likely already aware the content has been posted by you.

If there are several authors contributing to your blog the author information on your individual posts is more relevant. It's a personal choice but if you are trying to clean up your site this is one simple way to reduce some of the clutter.

Meta Data

Most WordPress themes have a "meta" section enabled on your pages (usually in the sidebar) where you can find the admin links such as the Login and XHTML details. This information is really only relevant to the blog manager and offers no benefit to your sites visitors. Given it is of no value to your readers you are better off removing it from your pages.

Unwanted Badges


It's become fairly common practice for some blog networks (and directories) to request member place a signatory badge on their blogs. You will find that in most cases these directories send very little traffic your way but make the most of the opportunity to advertise themselves on your pages. Essentially this is just visual pollution on your site and unless you feel there is some significant advantage to the affiliation I would suggest you are better off disconnecting your association and removing the unsightly badges. Take a little time to carefully evaluate the actual benefit you are gaining before cluttering your site with a swarm of badges.

Blog management 101 - The golden rule of web content: "Ensure that the elements you allow to exist on your pages create value for your site and above all, do not detract from your users experience when they visit". If you're not sure what content adds value and what puts visitors off, why not ask them. The other option is to engage services (perhaps a plugin) that track where your visitors are going on your site.

We have covered a few of the unnecessary slices of content that might be cluttering up your blog. Can you think of any others? Let us know in the comments section below.


Fraser is a Freelance Journalist, Author and CEO of Pro-Content Australia - providing professional online & offline content writing services worldwide.
You can visit his website  http://www.pro-content.com.au and Find more information at http://www.pro-content.com.au/Blog

Pro-Content provides specialist services in Web Content Creation, Website Reviews, Blog Management, Website Design, Blog Content, Article Writing, Advertising Text, Copywriting, Editing, Marketing, Internet & Social-Media Communication and more.



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