But, I’m not here to (just) talk about desserts (although I could) – today is the official launch of the new name blog! Hurrah!
Besides the Christmas festivities, this past week I’ve been hard at work behind-the-scenes here, doing a lot of maintenance work that I’d been putting off for ages and trying to ‘rollover’ as best I can the ‘old’ look to the ‘new’ look, including names, colour palette, images etc. If you see any broken pages or 404 errors, please let me know and I will fix them! Excellent, thank you.
Okay, question time.
What’s new?
The answer to that is simple – not much! Most of the changes are layout related and are mostly found in my re-jigged top menu.
I was giving my ‘1001 Book & Movie Challenges’ more real estate than they – frankly – deserved. But people do click on them and have inspired some to start their own, they bring in search traffic, and I am still quietly plugging away at them, so I moved them down under my ‘about’ column. Speaking of which, I gave my ‘About Karen’ spiel its own dropdown tab: sometimes page links get lost if they’re left in the top bar, and that can be annoying. So now I’ve done both. The other new bit is the ‘Where to Start’ option on the right, for newer folk who want to have a poke around to see what I talk about around these parts.
New categories
Which brings me to the biggest change of all – reorganising over 2,100 posts into brand new categories that branch out from the main three areas of ‘learning‘, ‘life‘ and ‘creativity‘. If you think that sounds like a headache, it was, a little, however in the spirit of honesty I’ll admit the first 1,000 or so were almost purely family oriented (yeah for mummyblogging!), and that made it much easier. It will still take me a long time to add featured images to early, text-pure posts. That’s if I do at all.
I know at blogging conferences they say to keep to a range of approximately 6-9 (ish) categories per blog, to really define and make your mark in your niche, I suppose, but then I remembered that I don’t like following rules. And I’m interested in lots of things. So more categories for me.
Again, as I’ve done many times before, there were moments when I was in my dashboard and I had that voice creep into my mind… perhaps this voice has visited you before. I was watching a Danielle LaPorte interview once and she mentioned this too. This voice said, “You could just delete it all. Burn it down, start over. Wipe the slate clean.” It wasn’t coming from any sense of negativity either; more out of intrepid verve. If the changeover suffered any major hiccups, my finger was raised and ready over that proverbial Big Red Button, but, luckily, things went well.
It was an important – and refreshing – moment. I had backups, sure, and a lot of the special material from this website has already been published in Crying in the Car, but it I’m talking ‘bigger picture’. Starting over doesn’t terrify me as it might once have done.
What’s next?
*rubs hands together*
Okay, I’ve been thinking a long time about where I see this blog heading. The subtle changes I’ve made over the past 12 months – tinkering with the previous banner being a small one, and completely changing the tag line a major one – were intended to coincide with this brand new name and direction. What’s amusing is how long I deliberated over the decision to ‘kill’ Miscellaneous Mum, and the angst that brought, wasn’t so bad in the end. But I’ll write about that more another day. That was then, this is now.
1. A return to longform
Writing longform (i.e posts with a count of 1000+ words) went out of favour for a long time, but is coming back into vogue. This is what many people will tell you.
I say, “Yes, but…”
Yes, shorter form remains prevalent overall, however some bloggers never really wrote long to start with. Other bloggers who started long have stayed so, often with great results, especially if their site are heavily instructional. SEO loves longform too, so SEO-lovers made great advantage of that.
I like reading both forms, and writing in either, but in 2015 I will try to make my posts longer, and better. I know there is the attraction of breaking up long content into a post series in order to stretch it out to serve existing readers (i.e not piss them off aka TL; DR)
What do I mean by ‘better’?
In as many aspect as possible: writing, image sourcing, finding helpful supplemental information. Really striving to serve readers better. With my hands clasped together, this is where I will ask you to please ask me if you have any questions or topics you’d like me to cover (or re-cover).
2. Video
I’ve been playing around with video editing software, either that came free with my PC, is available for free download, or store-bought. By fiddling with the free gear, it made me appreciate the extras that you get when you purchase the right software for your level of competency (no surprises there, really). I don’t want to tumble fully down the rabbit hole of gear until I get the basics sorted, but after doing research it’s nice to know that you don’t need to outlay a whole heap of money to get going.
If you want to keep up to date, you can subscribe directly to my YouTube channel. (A new introduction is on my to-do list!)
3. What’s to come
I have the regular monthly post about ‘What I’m Reading’, and I will keep that going. In 2015, I will be more focused, especially in the first half, on ticking off several ‘Living List‘ items. We are going overseas for 5 weeks – more on that another post – and some sites have been worked into the itinerary especially, such as our Gallipoli visit.
4. Me, elsewhere
As much as I’ve lifted my foot from the family focused posts over the past two-or-so years, I’ll probably be doing that even more now, either by contributing over at other websites or channeling whatever theme or topic that is concerning me into my creative work (it helps, oddly enough). I’ll be working very hard on several writing projects, so that will keep me busy too. Which neatly circles me back to my original point: what I want most of all is to get that feeling back of truly being present here on the blog. How often have you heard bloggers moan about being mentally ‘checked out’ and putting up content for the sake of the wheels – and stat counters – ticking over? No judgement from me, because I’ve done exactly the same thing.
Here’s a toast to 2015. May it be everything we want it to be.
If you have any thoughts, comments etc. do let me know x
