Five Steps To An Easier Blog Makeover

Blog makeovers are a necessary evil. Cleaning up and improving our blogs is a regular part of blog upkeep. It’s part of the job. The bigger your blog becomes the tougher the makeover gets. A simple theme change can set you back hours or even days if, for example, the post images/thumbnails use different sizes or URLs. We need to keep those broken links in order and update or remove unavailable videos. We need to remove, update and replace plug-ins.

Any time you have to go in and edit each post individually it can be very time consuming. That is exactly what I have done to this blog, Hot Blog Tips. I was lucky this time, the blog is fairly young and there wasn’t that many posts to edit. I’ve gone through the process on other blogs that took days to complete.

What We Did:

First I changed the theme. This is something I’ve been wanting to do for a while. That dark gaming theme from Elegant Themes makes a great looking blog but it just wasn’t the right fit. I also wanted something better suited for multiple authors. I found the perfect theme designed by Ptah Dunbar. It’s the WPFreemium Theme that was originally designed for one of my mentor blogs BloggingTips.com (highly recommended). I’ve been using an older version of the same theme on my Tracker Blog since day one and I love it. It’s the only blog I haven’t bothered changing the theme on because there is no need.

Each post had to be edited with a new image. Each image had to be re-sized. Already you can see the work involved, can’t you? I also decided to update each description tag (meta) while I was at it. Categories and tags were also updated. I removed several blog categories that were too similar and confusing.

The Tip – Think it through first:

If your blog is still new it’s a great time to consider a blog makeover. Think it through and think about the future.

1. Security should be first in line with any update.
2. Take your goals for the blog into consideration. Multiple authors, video posts, mobile viewing, image gallery, etc..
3. Think about load times.
4. Work in the best possible search engine optimization (SEO).
5. Check for dead and broken links and correct or remove them during the make-over.

“There’s nothing worse than getting halfway though the makeover just to realize you should have been adding image titles or alternate text for example“

Once you have everything figured out – let the fun begin. It’s a big project for sure but if planned right you should only need to edit each post once. There’s nothing worse than getting halfway though the makeover just to realize you should have been adding image titles or alternate text for example. Planning is everything!

Caution: Back That Blog Up! before any updates or changes.

What do you think about Hot Blog Tips’ makeover? That should have been step six, ‘Ask your readers‘. My bad. Let me have it anyway

Tagged as: Ideas, Security, themes