A Little Revamp, Goals and How I Get Anything Done in the School Holidays

Over the last week or so I’ve been making a few changes to my website. If you’ve visited over the last couple of days hopefully you’ve noticed that it’s all looking a bit shiny and new!  After two years, I thought it was time to up my blogging game and go for something that looked a bit more professional. I’ve also noticed a few direction changes in my blog over the last year or so, and thought it was time to update some of the information on here so that it more accurately reflects the kind of things I’m regularly writing about. New topics like health and lifestyle, writing and blogging as well as the old faithfuls like travel, reading and family. In line with this I’ve changed my site tagline from ‘a family travel and photography blog’ to ‘writing, lifestyle, travel, books and blogs.’

And so….

At the start of the holidays, one of my items on our family summer bucket list was  ‘Gail – two days on website’, which I thought would give me enough time to make the necessary changes. Ha! I’m now laughing at the pre-summer version of myself who thought that two full commitment-free days would somehow magically appear.  Instead, I’ve gone with my usual school holiday formula which involves getting up early to do any blog work, writing, and said tweaks to website before the kids get up. There are still a few tweaks ongoing, but for the moment, I’m trying to go with the mantra of:

Done is better than perfect

Say it out loud recovering perfectionists, exhale and repeat.

So to take you on a swift tour of the new website, there are some new menus, a new home page and a rather different (hopefully better!) look to the whole thing. From the home page you can access all my recent blogs, as well as a new ‘featured’ area too. If you click on the 1,2,3… at the bottom of the featured area, you can see the rest of the featured posts – a good way for me to highlight some of my favourite picks for new visitors. In the sidebar, there is also a new ‘find out more’ area, and a list of some of the categories and tags I use, which you can click on to see all the posts related to that theme. It turns out, though, that I have been using categories and tags willy nilly for two years now…. (a helpful learning point for new bloggers – think carefully about how you categorise your posts 😉 ). So I still have a *bit* of work to do there in terms of rationalising things, but anyway…

Done is better than perfect. Say it out loud, exhale and repeat.

Hopefully the new layout will make it much easier for people to find posts that might interest them – as opposed to just seeing my three most recent posts and having to rummage through archives to find anything else at all 🙂 . Let’s face it, no one ever does that last bit, so I’m hoping this will make the whole reading experience more streamlined. Let’s hope so, anyway – do tell me what you think!

In terms of going forward, I’m feeling quite motivated to keep my site looking better (and more shiny). I hope to start using my ‘proper’ camera a bit more often – to date, most of the pictures you see on here will have been taken with my phone. In the meantime, I have about a million tags and categories to sort out…but let’s face it, it is still the school holidays…..

Done is better than perfect, eh?

Say it out loud, exhale and repeat.

G x