Decluttering your Blog

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When you search around the Blogosphere you will see sites which go for the minimalist touch and others just clutter up there blog with thousands of widgets, buttons and other stuff. So we recommend you declutter your blog.
Typically newbies will go head and plaster there site with every button or widget they can find later to realize there no room for the real content.How many of us have a categories sidebar which is as long as their latest post? This is a total waste of our website real estate. And every inch can have potential to make money so don’t waste this space.

When you have come to this stage you can do two things:

1. Create a complete new theme

2. Touch up/ tweak your current theme

Some tips to help tweak your current theme:

Widgets

Widgets come with two problems, they can fill up your whole blog and they do add a lot of additional time when you blog loads up which can delay the content from loading.

Last week I made the decision to remove this widget from my site, for several reasons. Firstly they produced little or no traffic to my site, it also slowed down the loading of your site and wasted a lot of my valuable space in my sidebar.

My next widget that may get the chop or relocated is MyBlogLog, this widget track the members that have recently visited my site. This can be good as I can see who regularly visit my site on a daily basis to follow my latest post. I am leaning towards possibly creating three column footer and shifting it down there.

Categories list

As I mentioned earlier that reducing your categories down to a manageable number will help declutter you sidebar. Do you really need 50 categories with only one post per category; I feel a good number is in the range of 10-15 but no more.

The likes of Problogger has 17, Onemansgoal has 18,JohnChow has 12 and AndyBeard has 17, so you can see you don’t need many categories, or an alternative is too have sub categories which can easy reduce your list.

Currently I have 14 but last month I had around 18 or more, so with a little reshuffling this can be reduced.

Monthly Archive

This one is like the categories, typically only affects people who have a year plus archive. Currently I only have a small archive so mines not an issue but over a long time it will expand.

Another way is when people use the exploded archive list where it shows individual days or a week archive this just wastes space so stay away form this type of list.

Buttons and Tools

This is the biggest and largest waste of space on a blog, we all have them whether they are PR button, RSS feeds, blog directories or any other buttons. Or maybe can i sreduce the size of my monster RSS feed button?

Ask yourself do you need them? Or do they add value to your site?

Simply go to Google Analytic or other similar program and check, see whether they give you any traffic or any money. If answer is yes then you can keep them but if they give you little or none would it is better to remove or replace them with a different button.

Tidy up the buttons you have left but creating an invisible table ( I use dreamweaver then copy the code into wordpress) and aligning them up to make a pleasant looking layout.

As you can see from my screen shots below, I previously kept my blog directories in a neat tabled format, but now I feel they give little or no traffic to my site so I have removed them to tidy up my sidebar more.

Before with the blog directories in an invisible table

After i have removed the Blog Directory buttons

Google ads

We all use the most popular form of money making online some where in our blogs, but do we really earn that much money from them? They come in many forms and sizes and can easy fill up our blog. Take a close look and analysis if you really need such big adverts or can they be reduced and yet maintain there value.

Affiliate Programs / Blog Adverting space

With the crazy of adverting spots (125×125) they can again take up a lot of space and because they vary in many colours and designs can look very messy when put together. But as we want make some money from blogging we have no choice but to add them, but look at what is an expectable number. I have six adverting spots and I mix them with my affiliate programs to save on space.

I would not go beyond this number as it will again look very messy and will take up far too much space.

In Conclusion

In my opinion Minimalistic or clean blog is the way to go and must be easy and pleasant to navigation around by your visitors, this can be done by removing a few buttons, maybe rearranging your important widgets in an easy format, Also look at removing the standard features that come with wordpress like calenders, etc.

Here’s a few tips that will help improve the experience your readers have when visiting your blog, please share what you have done to declutter your blog…

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October 29, 2007 | Filed Under Journal, blogging Tips

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Comments

8 Responses to “Decluttering your Blog”

dott-com on October 29th, 2007 3:11 pm

nice tips and now yeepage get some blog reconstruction when you remove all the button on sidebar.

I already remove all the unnecessary thingy from my theme from the first time I’m using it. But still keep the theme designer url on it. Now maybe I will remove the widgetbuck ads asap.
admin on October 29th, 2007 4:02 pm

You must look at the income that widgetbuck is making, if you justify it then its fine to keep it..
Andy Beard on October 29th, 2007 8:28 pm

If you are a dofollow blogger, reducing internal linking can have hugely negative effect on SEO

If you are using a theme that is broken (loading sidebar before content I regard as broken) then there are plugins now available to help solve the problem.
http://www.scratch99.com/2007/10/new-wordpress-plugin-to-help-slow-widgets-maybe/
constructicle boy on October 29th, 2007 11:18 pm

great housekeeping tips!i felt the same too.The directories or link farms are simply useless.Maybe for a few like what I have stated in my post today on.But most,a waste of space and dangerous as well!
Sutocu on October 30th, 2007 1:17 am

I hate some websites that have a million widgets in the sidebar. Another way to cut down the space they take is add a second sidebar, but you have that already.

Well, at least I don’t have that problem. My blog might be too minimalistic in fact But I’m working on a new template.
Domtan on October 30th, 2007 2:02 am

Totally Agree. There’s just something remarkable, neat and professional about a minimalist design. Not only it’s aesthetically pleasing, but also saves your visitors that extra second when the site loads.
Stephanie on November 15th, 2007 5:23 am

Hello! I was using StumbleUpon today and happened to come across your site. I really like what you’re doing here! Keep it up!

Stephanie

Why stay home when you can escape?
http://www.makethegreatescape.org/
Guru on December 20th, 2007 6:55 am

Some nice pointers on blog management .. Almost everyone goes with three column templates these days .. I also have a thing against the templates which have a real narrow content space .. The line width is so low that not even 8 words fir in a line..

Also we need to abstain from using flashy font sizes, colors, sometimes we think they could draw the attention of the visitors .. But certain such flashy misjudgments can even make you lose readers ..

BTW your page seems to be taking an unusually long time to load .. Almost a whole minute,i’m sure it isn’t a prob with the BB connection, cos even heavy sites like problogger open up pretty quickly…

Maybe you need to declutter a little yourself… Chillax ..