Top Tip Tuesday 4

As we move on the journey to help your blog to become more successful I hope you have learned something new each week!  Do you have something you would like to share with us?  Please email me at byutatortot@gmail.com!

Louise has our next tip:

Do some housekeeping: keeping your blog tidy



Picture this…you’re getting ready for work…you find a sock but you can’t find the matching sock. You were too busy to put your laundry away last night so you just left everything strewn all over your room. 10 minutes later you still haven’t found it, so you give up and go to work in a pair of your old holey socks.

Navigating blogs can be a bit like that…sometimes, they’re so cluttered you can’t find what you’re looking for, so you eventually give up. It’s all a matter of housekeeping and all you need to do is keep on top of it by spending a few minutes every week doing a few little jobs. Here are a few suggestions about how you can keep on top of things.

Delete any old posts which you no longer need, things like your old price lists and posts that are no longer needed or linked to. Be careful not to delete anything which other people may have linked to. Things I delete are posts where I’ve said things like “don’t forget to enter the giveaway before it closes tomorrow” or “the giveaway winner was…..”. I keep those up for a week or two and then delete them. Avoid deleting anything that search engines may refer to. Articles and special features are best kept because search engines love those and you don’t want people getting a page not found error.

Keep blinkies to a minimum as they can be distracting and prevent people finding what they’re looking for. Maybe just post 1 at a time and change them each month.

Keep your sidebars free of clutter. If you have some sidebar content which is repetitive, add it to a post and put a link to it in your sidebar instead. Things like blog awards and blog buttons repeat (ie you have lots of them). These work well stored in a post a just linked to the sidebar. This will save your visitors having to wade through all that clutter to get to the important stuff. Your sidebars (IMO) should be kept for things that you particularly NEED people to see, or things which they will find useful, like your archive.

Separate sidebar content by adding a title to the widget and adding a line underneath each title. The title then acts as a border which separates your sidebar content…more stylishly than just having that awful dotted border (that everyone wants to remove) at the bottom of each sidebar element.

What do you do to keep your blog free of clutter?

I hope you found this feature useful, if you have any questions or comments, then leave a comment below and I'll do my best to answer it :)

About Louise: I am 35 years old, married and live in the UK. I am a blog designer with over 20 years experience producing digital graphics and over 10 years writing on blogs. My main blog is my blog design blog, Adori Graphics, where I sell custom blog makeovers and premade blog templates as well as posting tutorials and blog freebies. I consider myself an "ethical blogger" and believe that everyone should give something back to the blogging community, which is why I write guest blogger articles, offer sponsorships to blogger conferences, sponsor giveaways and run a free blog makeover program called Write From The Heart.