Regular blog review and maintenance, for all your social media, is important. When I came to WordPress last October, I was new to the platform and to all the blogging tools and options.  I want to share my tips with other bloggers in case you have not thought about these things.

Just like a garden your blog needs tending to help it grow.

Redesign and Improvement of Journey of Mixed Emotions

• Browsed my theme options, and realized that I could do more with my choice. I saw another blog with the same theme, but they had a more interesting and dynamic front page. Me too!

• Spent time reorganizing widgets to make the site balance better and reduce clutter. I had too much going on, too many images. I changed some grids to lists, and removed my background image.

• Originally I had all my links listed on the front page, using the widget. I realized that I had a lot of information about Sweden that was better placed on a page, which was then accessed via a submenu (Useful Links).

• I went back to old posts and made some edits, adjusted some links, removed clutter. Even though it is very rare that people end up on those posts, they do, and I want their first impression to make them click for more…

• Looked through my huge personal photo library and added some new headers, removed some old ones.

Distribution and Maintenance

• Systematically went through all the menu options in the Dashboard to see what I might improve or change on my front end.

For example, I realized that I needed to change the content in my RSS feed posts. Instead of making (I mean, encouraging) a subscriber click and come to my actual blog, I was losing stats and exposure by not changing that setting. Go to Settings>Reading>For each article in a feed, show>Summary.

• Added my own blog to my Google + Reader so that I could monitor my posts and see what my audience see on their mobile or monitor. This is how I discovered I needed to change the settings above.

• This tips applies more to Facebook…but review for security and privacy updates. Did something change? Can I tighten up the distribution in some way? Or should I be less restrictive?

• It is good practice to go to your Reader>Blogs I Follow list and click around for a while. Remove blogs that are long gone or have not posted in months. The Reader is great, but you miss a lot of content. I use this list to revisit all the people I obviously wanted to follow but perhaps missed reading.

• Reviewed the free blog directories where I submitted my blog , and if they have still not listed me I removed the images/links from my website. Only those blog directories that are active get to be here.

• Are there categories you can roll up into a general topic? Now that I have more posts I was able to clean this up a bit more.

Clean lines. Clutter free.