This blog has been neglected for far too long. Lyrical Host takes up the vast majority of my time, but even still I’ve chosen to not post here.

The main reason for that is (was) the theme. I bought a super pretty theme, but I opened up a nightmare. Lots of super basic things (like margins) were totally wrong, things were broken, and I still don’t really see the point/benefits of Genesis as an end-user. My images were blurry, plugins were broken, and it was all basically a huge mess. I GDPR’d it up in May, but then left it again.

Last night I decided to revisit everything. I turned off automatic Smushing and created a new, less blurry logo. I dug through the theme settings, widgets, and menu, and fixed some things and changed some margins and colours. I made 35 new featured images so I have no excuse not to post things without at least one image (!)

I also fixed the broken social feed, replacing it with a nicer plugin, and finally ditched Mashshare in favour of sleeker sharing buttons, which suit the style of this theme more. I also deleted a ton of old plugins, switched contact form plugins, and had a quick look over some of the posts sitting in my drafts. I even updated my Twitter header image to match. The next stop is to update my About page, sort out tons of old content pages and figure out what to do with them, and install an SSL certificate (still can’t believe I haven’t done that yet!). And then I’ll move on to looking at subdomains. Whew!

Even though there’s still tons to do, I already feel a lot happier with how the site is looking. It’s not even been as much work as I thought it would be. With that in mind, I’ve decided to set myself a goal of blogging a lot more here in August. I have a bunch of drafts I can finish up, and I really want to think about what direction to take this blog in. It’s been my personal diary, a collection of blogging tips, a content site, and more recently it’s been a kind of mish-mash story of my self-employment journey so far. It’ll probably still continue to evolve into what I need it to be for my whole life, and I’m okay with that. What visitors will think, I’m not really sure. I’m not sure what people like and don’t like from my posts and topics, and I feel like it needs to be a lot more cohesive. At the same time, I’ve never been a fan of deleting content or rebranding; you never know, I might want to read back over all this crazy writing one day ;)

So watch this space on that – I have no idea what direction I’m going to go in, but it’s exciting to be finally thinking about it!

August’s goals

I love reading (and writing) goal setting posts, and it’s been a long time since I’ve done one, so here goes:

• Post here at least twice a week
• Finish and publish the About page
• Sort out old content

…and that seems like a reasonable list for now considering how much other stuff I have to get done (August is Lyrical Host’s first birthday!)

So tell me…what are your goals for August? :)