50 Tips to Unclutter Your Blog
Here are 50 very useful Tips to Unclutter Your Blog. These are the ones of which I’m guilty:
3. Prune your categories list. Categories perform an important navigational function but their use is limited when you have a lot of categories. The longer your list, the less likely readers are to go through it. Prune your categories down to at most 15 or 20.
8. Remove top commenter widgets. I have heard plenty of stories about people spamming blogs with dozens of comments in order to make the list and get a backlink. This undermines community more than it adds to it. If your top commenters have made only a few comments then this can also undermine social proof.
10. Put your blogroll on a separate page. You can link to the blogroll or links page from your sidebar. If a reader is interested in seeing your recommended sites they will be willing to travel to a page where they can be easily viewed and returned to.
20. Remove ’spam blocked’ counts. Do your readers really care how many spam comments Akismet or any other service has blocked? Akismet already comes with every copy of Wordpress that is downloaded. It doesn’t really need more advertising.
29. Remove time-stamps. Unless the reader is from your state or city and knows it then time-stamps lose all meaning. You might write a post at 7am but in the next state it could be 8am. In another country, it might be 8pm. The time of day has little meaning on the internet.
44. Prune under-performing ads. If an ad is making you next to nothing then remove it. This will strengthen the message of those ads you’re displaying that are working.
Only 6 is pretty good, I think. I’ll get to them when I get to them.