Helping Monica Ricci make her blog simpler and a little more visually appealing inspired me to take a hard look at my own blog. I wasn't thrilled with what I saw. Averaging over 6000 visitors a month I realized that I really need to focus on making it simpler, easier to read and navigate. So I've started the process of simplifying, decluttering & improving it with a new look. This project is NOT easy! With over 350 posts, it's a huge undertaking so I'm breaking the project down to make it more manageable. 
So here's a few of the things I'm doing to improve the blog a little bit every day.
- Make the title banner better describe what's in the blog.
- Reduce the number of categories. I've cut the categories nearly in half already and plan to get it down to 10 or so. Recategorizing 350+ posts takes a lot of time!
- Rewrite or Delete Old Posts - The process of recategorizing has been especially painful because my perfectionist self reads the old posts and cringes. I want to rewrite every single one! I've learned so much over the past 2 years of blogging and some of those old posts are embarrassing! Some of them I'm just deleting rather than taking the time to rewrite them.
- Declutter Columns - Using the New Pages Feature Typepad finally rolled out. Wordpress has had this for years. I'm not sure how I'm going to do this, because the Typelist feature only works if you post the content in the column. I'm not sure I want to give up the convenience of the typelists.
- Write shorter more frequent posts. This weekend I caught myself writing a mega post again and the light went on. Why not break it up and pace out the posts daily? Since my last vacation I had gotten out of the habit of programming my posts for future posting. I do this because I can't write a post every day when I'm working with clients.
- Use more headings & photos. I've been doing this for a while. But I never went back and did this with older posts. Looking at some of them now - I don't even want to read them they are so bland looking.
I truly appreciate all of you who have subscribed to Neat Living and included me in your Feed Reader! I want to make this blog better for you so I'm asking for your help. What can I do to improve the blog even further? Questions I have are below. You don't need to answer them all, but if anything comes to you while reading the questions I'd love to hear your feedback. You can leave comments below...or if you don't want to publicly tell me how to improve, you can email me at: abenefit@neatandsimple.com
- What do you like about this blog that I should NOT change?
- What should I STOP doing?
- What would you like to see that isn't here now?
- What would you do to improve the Neat Living blog?
- Do you think I should narrow my focus and specialize in 5 or fewer topics?
- Everyone is doing daily themes...I've liked being more spontaneous and writing about whatever moves me. Should I do some daily themes too? Does that really make you read a blog more often? Or is it just a writer's preference?
Thank you in advance for taking a minute to help me make Neat Living Blog a little Neater!
