It's day 14 and today your task is to identify and update a key post or page on your blog.
While important - many pages on your blog will become dated over time - so today give them a spring clean.
ProBlogger, DPS & TwiTip
Hi Darren, thanks for the new challenge. I can't believe that we are nearly half-way through already.
Can I ask - how do you know when to create a page as opposed to a collection/series of posts? I see on your blog you have a page for 'make money blogging' for example, which has information and then links to relevant posts.
My thought was to create pages for topics that are fundamental or intrinsic to the blog. Pages that people who aren't necessarily familiar with blogs will head to and then move on to read more in detail in the posts. It was with this thought that I originally created pages for each of the major aspects of my blog.
These pages are all lazy. Right now they are just pictures with a link to the relevant category page and I know that this isn't the way to do it. I *do* have information which is unchanging, timeless if you like, which I think would belong on the page, with the posts spiralling out to expand on the topics. But I'm really flying blind here.
Last night I updated my home page and my about page. I know I still have a way to go. I did however get rid of my second sidebar, which had my 'blog roll' on it, plus some buttons etc. I realised it was distracting *and* encouraging people to click away as soon as they got to my page!
I found updating the about page especially hard. I found it hard to work out how far to go into personal, particularly when I want to remain fairly anonymous! I'm scooting around looking at other people's about pages but I don't think it is something that I'll be able to work out immediately.
Beyond Beeton: Household Management for the Modern Age | Cooking | Budgeting | Weight Loss | Work/Lfe Balance
for me there are two main reasons that I create 'pages' as opposed to 'posts'.
1. if I don't want there to be a date on the post that might make it look dated.
2. if I want to publish something that doesn't appear in my blog's RSS feed for some reason. For example I created a few different signup pages for 31DBBB so I could track which techniques worked to get people signing up. If I'd made them all 'pages' they'd have all appeared in my feed and annoyed readers.
I'm sure others use them for different reasons but they're the main two for me.
Thanks Darren, that is really useful. I hadn't thought about the RSS implications at all.
Off to do my homework!
I've updated my Core Beliefs page. It was a skeleton that longed for some meat on its bones. Each time I looked at it I was reminded of it. Today's task made it happen.
BlogAsReligion.com - Blogging sucess without a gazillion readers
This was a great task - not only have I published a followup to an old post on my blog today, but it's given me loads of ideas to add to my editorial calendar.
This is a great thing to do periodically. I recently updated some old content on my blog and it has paid off. I added more images, changed the font, cleaned up the writing for improved meter, and even changed the titles. There are more than these, but these are 4 of the posts that underwent major overhauls:
From December 18, 2007: It's Full Of Stars: Mass Effect Commentary
Original Title: Mass Effect Review
From November 21, 2007: Beware Of The Big Lizard: 16 Rules For Success
Original Title: 16 Rules For Success
From August 31, 2008: The Story Factor: How To Lie To People You Think Are Dumb
Original Title: The Story Factor
From October 14, 2007: Rescued By Twin Blondes, I Was Bruce Willis For A Bit
Original Title: R/L Adventure Caused Me To Miss A Raid
@mattb4rd on Twitter
Good reminder to do some blog maintenance.
Updated my "About Us" page - just a tweek but well woeth it.
Updated my "Contact us " section - discovered a broken link which was very handy
Our Hiking Blog - enjoying the outdoors -trips, gear, food, clothing and fun.
Thanks Darren - this is something I would never have thought to do! Going hunting tonight to find some good update material. Also checking out the forums to find someone for the next assignment who is doing a design/lifestyle blog. Or should we go "out of field" to make it more effective??
I really think readers would appreciate a topic archive of my posts (which might make me more organised with my tags).
How do I do this? (Blogger)
Also, Darren originally I voted "unsure" on your poll re. whether I would invest $10 or so on a 31DBBB booklet. I'm definitely in the yes camp now!
I updated the About This Site page, in which I found a spelling mistake (yikes!) and the Contact Me page, just to make them more up to date and in line with my vision for my blog.
Spud On The Run - A Couch Potato's Guide to Weight Loss & Fitness
Ah I see someone has beaten me to it - the first thing I did was go back to some tags and do those better. Also writing uup some stuff to update one or two other pages.
I updated my Resources page (which I use link to recommended merchants, products, books, also outside websites and articles). Instead of typing in the content, though, I used the Links feature of Wordpress. Each resource is a link in a category (such as recommended merchant, recommended products, recommended books, etc.): I created a custom page template to showcase some of the links as images, and some as list of links, on the Resources page. Using "Add Links" or "Edit Links" through WP allows me to update/add/change/edit this list easily, without ever having to touch the content to change any of the resource recommendations. Some of the products, books and merchants are affiliates, so the URL has my ID embedded. Some are not. The system works for both. I'm really excited and can see this working for in-house list of resources too. Here's how I got started, though not all of this applies to what I did:
If you read that forum topic, you'll see that I did not know what I was doing at first. ;)
I have some more pages to do to complete this task... but I'm excited about this makeover and think the new setup (using Links) will help me in keeping up with it in the future.
gnowfglins.com ~ Healthy Food
I updated my readers favourite story, with labels and abit of editing
http://outbackselfhelp.blogspot.com/2008/03/inspired-trip-to-perth-day-1-thursday.html
It was circulated in another town by a work collegue.
Nearly half way through the challenge and I have improved heaps
thanks Robyn
We have been putting off doing an about us page and contact page for so long. I must say it was a rewarding experience to finally complete this exercise.
To us
Knowing your why is so important for motivation. As Jim Rohn once said:
"if you have a why the how is easy".
The about us page will be something for us to refer back to if ever we lack the motivation to continue blogging.
TIP
Look at the recommended about us page from one of the recommended resources back in Day 4 -- http://chris.pirillo.com/about/. It is a great about page model to follow.
QUESTION
For the moment we are not going to redo the layout, headers, icon and favicon. We need to find a good thesis theme designer. If anyone can recommend a good designer please contact us, since we finally have a contact form now :)
Children are born ExcitedByLife. When did we forget?
Great idea! I went back and revised by About Me/Biography page, which was much needed. As well as going back to do that, I had written a recent article and was able to go back into all of my past blog posts and insert a link to that article into those posts. It took a few minutes, but now that new article has a few incoming links that will hopefully help with search engine traffic and ranking.
laxpat916
Member
Real eyopener, this lesson. I thought I only had one page. The trouble is, other than the about me page which I have been avoiding, it is only one page. What am I missing.
Well, I don't have enough posts that there is any one of which that can be appropriately updated (replaced, but not updated), so I decided to try to fix some inconsistancies with the WP template pages (which I had very thoroughly modified pretty much beyond recognition visually but not wrt coding.
So I managed to fix a few things (like getting the sidebar on the left side and fairly decently spaced on most (I haven't checked all the possible pages yet) pages. Then I created the new banner I want to us on both my website and the weblog, uploaded it, changed the permissions and then replaced the coding for specifically that.
IT Won't Display! I have yet to figure out why but if anyone has any suggestions as to what I might be forgetting to do, please let me know. The new image file is about 96 kb.
Thanks
Patricia
It was really good to go through my side bar and clean it up - I'm also currently working on improving my about page and how to make the site more 'sticky' as a whole. I found that adding a related posts section at the bottom of my posts, however, reduced by bounce rate by 20%. Thanks for the helpful hints!!
Hi there everyone. My first post here but ive been following this to the point everyday now. And this challange really is fun! Today's task was to update a key post/page, I choose to update a page. Infact my homepage. This is what i have done:
Thats what i've done today. It sure was a fun assignment today, im also plannig to totally redo my About page, from scratch pretty much...
Thanks
I just finished reading this assignment and all of the posts here and my journey through 31DBBB has come to a screeching halt. As I sorted through my blog I realized how much I had to do so I am going to stop on this assignment and fix up/add a bunch of different posts and pages. Off the top of my head:
1. I have an "about the site" page, but not a "about me" page
2. I don't have a contact page.
3. I am changing a term I use on my site so I will need to change previous posts so the term is present in all these posts.
4. I need to add a links page and a resources page
Lots of work to do before I get to day 15.
I agree with @JeremieMiller. This Day 14 assignment could last for weeks because I have a lot of things I need to do. But I did redo my header to better reflect my elevator pitch (it's so SHORT now) and cleaned up my sidebar. And made a LONG list of other things I want to do.
I'm enjoying reading everyone else's posts, too. Great ideas all around. Now if we just had MORE TIME to do them. :-)
Perhaps I'll move on to Day 15 anyway, and recycle back to Day 14 again and again...
Seen God lately? Lisa notes... where she's seen Him today.
This was a really important one for me actually; I've been slowly going through my blog, updating my side bar, linking between posts, etc etc.
Since using analytics I've found that my most visited page is this one. It's a really old post that I wrote about an illustrator that I liked, but it seems every time someone searches for him, my blog comes up. The images are all dead links now and I'm not really interested in updating them - it was just a post I did about someone that inspired me, a few years ago.
So I went on and just did a quick update, trying to get people to look at the rest of my blog, or get involved by commenting on what they think about his work.
Do you think this is a good way to go? I'd like people to look at the rest of my blog after they've gone to that page.
The other thing that I'm planning to do this week is redesign my banner - I've had it for a good 9 months now and I'm bored of it. My blog is now called Sketchblog and I want to retitle it that, once I've got the header to match.
So yeah, this day is definitely more of a week-long thing. But then, I'm behind anyway, and only doing the tasks that I feel really fit with the direction of my blog (most do though), like the interlinking post, I did loads of that because my blog is nearly 2 years old.
I won't be able to complete this in a day, but I am at work on making a new About page for A Future in Noise, since the very first post isn't quite relevant to the blog, and I have had 3 new contributors since it began. I think I'm going to use Issuu for it, since it is such a cool option! Also, revised the whole front page just recently, though some adjustments might be useful.
Emceefarm
Member
I tweaked my bio page and changed it from the default "About Me" to "Susan McCarron" so that people will know right away who to contactjust by looking at the page tab.
I updated my most popular post: How Bloggers Make Money From Blogs, transformed my about-me widget into an about page, and reworked my front page. Took me two days though.
This exercise is good since we need to keep the quality of our key pages high. As quolity is very important, every step we take to improve it becomes necessary.
Thanks Darren.
Go Blogger (dot) net - Tips to Help Blogs Go Profitable
I've fallen behind on the challenge but I picked up again today :)
I realised that my home page doesn't clearly state the purpose of the blog. I'm using a Wordpress hosted blog and the theme I use doesn't display a tagline. So I added a small text box in the sidebar that briefly describes the blog.
Also I haven't had much luck with subscribers. I reasoned that it may be because the subscribe box was too small. So I enlarged the text a bit. It now looks like an ad but we'll see if it gets people to subscribe.
I've also realised that I need to update my About and Contact pages and go into more detail. Ran out of time today so I'll be doing that over this week.
Cheers,
David K
I take one or two hours a week to review the look, feel, along with what the stats are saying.
This week I removed a plugin that put a bunch of code at the bottom of the website. Added Google Analytics code inside an insert plugin. Finally, verified that a post will go to Twitter and then posted on Facebook without a lot of extra work.
I updated my about page to include some links to popular posts on the site.
I did some of this back when I worked on my elevator pitch - I updated my header and my about page. I need to give some thought to revamping my e-mail bait and monetizing my blog. I think this is too big a project for today, but will mull it over and try to make to a plan over the weekend.
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