If you’re anything like me, your motivation to blog is partially related to how you feel about your website in general. An old theme, broken functionality, draft overwhelm, and other similar frustrations just make me ignore my website until I have enough time to fix everything up (which is pretty much never!)
I have several blogs I’d neglected for years. They didn’t really have a direction, and I wasn’t motivated to work on them. It all seemed like too much work.
When I sat down with one of them recently, determined to get it active again, I realised that it was nowhere near as much work as I thought to get it looking presentable, even after four years of abandonment!
Here are some of the things I did to transform it in just half an hour:
1. Installed a new theme
Picking the right theme is such a huge part of how motivated I feel about blogging. If I’m sitting there thinking, ‘Oh I need to fix that thing’, ‘Eh, I wish the font/alignment/large image size were different’, it just ends up being a series of distractions. And I’m not able to be proud of my post even after it’s been edited. So the right theme is super important.
For this particular site I went for something super simple. You can always add your personality through plugins, your logo/header image, and of course your writing. Complicated or distracting themes will just put you off blogging, either because it’s slow/a hassle to write, or because you’re endlessly finding things you want to change.
2. Changed up the sidebar
I moved things around, added a search bar widget, added social media icons, and updated my automatic social feed widgets. And of course, I needed a new “About me” introduction since four years ago my life, interests, and job were very different!
3. Refreshed old posts
If you have a huge site, you don’t have to do every post (just the most recent page of blog posts, or your most popular). The blog I was working on was pretty small, so it didn’t take long to go through 30 odd posts, fix typos, lengthen them to a minimum of 300 words (some were just photo posts!), and add a stock feature image to each. If you don’t like stock photos, you could always resize images from within your posts instead.
And if you have any time over after that, I’d recommend making a cute new logo for your header. Boom! Website refresh, done!
When was the last time you refreshed your site? Was it a bigger job than you thought?
