How I’m Improving My Blog.
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I’m a little more than halfway through the improvements of my blog right now, and much of the work is behind the scenes. However…I’ll just share my methodology:
How I’m Organizing My Content To Make It Easier To Find.
- Consolidating Categories- We’re merging a lot of categories here. We’re going to be down to: 2.0, GTD, Ten Day Team, Gtrack (a private category), Podcast, People/Persuasion, Coahing, Goals, Mindset, Mortgage, Best (best of), Tranparency, Jotts, Schedule, CRM, LOSS, Rants, HREU and Lenderama. That’s down from 35++ categories, so we’re getting somewhere.
- Related Posts Plugin (or equivalent)- To Keep The Site Depth Up.
- 2 Category Per Topic Max + Best Of. There are a lot of posts that span categories. Goals + anything else is a big one for me. But–to organize content, we should put everything in one or two drawers at the most.
- Title Case For Everything: This is my concession to SEO. But really, I’ve learned it just LOOKS better to say: “How Waking Up On Time Helps Your Day” rather than: “How waking up on time helps your day.”
- Certain Posts Get Exlcuded From The Feed- A lot of posts are just for me. How many contacts I made, how messy the house is. Have a category or two to exclude. You can mention that they are there.
- “Best Of” Category. I’m about 25% through it, but I’ve made a “best of” category. http://genuinechris.com/category/best, to highlight the best content I’ve created. This is the top 5-10% of the content I’ve made, and a great place to start.
- Better About Page: This is coming, I promise. Probably next week, and it’s set to ‘private’ till it’s right. This explains how I intend for people to interact with this blog, and what I’m putting up and where.
- Hire Me Page: Thanks, Skellie. (It will replace Privacy later today)
- SEO Pack on Every Post: The big benefit that this has is it refamiliaized me with the content. Even if it does nothing for my SEO-fu, I’m still ahead because I’ve been reacquainted with my blog content.
How I’m Improving The Design of My Blog:
- Highlighting the most novel stuff: The Google doc in my sidebar is important; it’s a LIVE pulse on the mortgage part of my life. It’s updated every day I work, and nobody is admitting how much they are earning (or how much they have, or how much they weigh, etc.)
- Top Nav Bar: Seemed pretty basic, but the Prosense Blue theme was cool out of the gate, but needed major tweaks for me to dig it. At a glance, from every page, people can get wherever I want ‘em to.
- Wider- I’m stuck with fixed width. I might as well make it wide enough. 700 isn’t wide enough, and if you have a crappy browser, screw you.
- Planned Sidebars- Before, I either used Dosh Dosh’s default, or just threw whatever the hell I was in the mood for up. I took a few minutes and thought about what was important, what wasn’t. I’ve not started executing the sidebar stuff–but I expect to.
- Different Color Scheme- Again, picked and I’ll execute soon. Will be black/white and gray with a ton of pictures.
I spent some time with a word doc on full screen mode (and yes, I’m in love with full screen mode these days), to plan out where I wanted to welcome people. I think it’s safe to expect really cool things to come in the future.
Now…to get more ‘best’ content up….(I have a man crush on Instant Boss…what a focus tool).
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