One of the things I love most about the web is also one of the things I hate the most: everything is a work in progress.

I love that you always have the chance to be better, but I hate the fact that I can’t just tick something off my list as ‘done’, permanently.

I’m working on my winter blogging goals at the moment, and I feel like for every one thing I fix, there are a hundred more things that pop up. So far, I’m resisting jumping from task to task; I could easily spend a month working on small snags and improvements if I had a month free. Since I’m lucky if I have three consecutive hours free, I’m trying to break everything down into smaller chunks. I’ve already started a list of tasks that will form my Spring blogging goals, and I’ve added a couple of plugins and made some dashboard changes that definitely weren’t on my winter list.

Fundamentally, my main problem is that I’m really impatient. The second I think of something, I want to do it. My brain goes like this: ‘Hey, you know what would be good…?’ Cut to five minutes later. ‘Why hasn’t that thing I thought of happened yet?’

This was only ever supposed to be a temporary theme, yet it’s been up for over a year now. On the surface it’s not too bad, and I quite like the design generally, but you don’t have to dig too far to see 404s, old stuff, ugly stuff, stuff that doesn’t really belong anywhere.

This is what happens when your blog has gone through three CMS changes, an identity crisis, several revolutions of the internet, many domain names, too many themes (‘layouts’, ‘skins’, ‘templates’) to count, and an owner who feels like she’s been in a washing machine…all over a period of fifteen years.

That’s a decade and a half of crap (if you think that’s bad, you should see my house).

I know I’m not alone on the ‘I’m not happy with my website’ thing. I’ve written about it before, read about it, and despite completely rebranding everything about a year ago, I feel like I’ve just thrown most of my online life into the world’s largest virtual cupboard and shut the door on it.

I think the key is to chip away at it and approach it in a positive way. Yes, there may be a lot to do, but a lot of those things aren’t important. The most important thing is to have a reasonable, achievable list of tasks and work through them to specific deadlines. I’ve been mixing interesting things with boring ones in an attempt to actually get stuff I hate doing done, and so far it’s working.

Mindless or boring tasks are always better with a much-loved film (new stuff is too distracting) or some music in the background. I spent a couple of evenings recategorising all 586 blog entries by hand, fixing other things as I went along. I’ve also fixed over 1,000 broken links. It’s been nostalgic. It’s been about appreciating a fresh start. It’s also been tedious, and cuddly because the cats insisted on sitting on me while I was doing it (technically they were helping, as it meant I couldn’t get up from the sofa).

I’ve also decided I’m going to treat this site more like a job, in that I’m going to set aside specific time to work on it and make sure I stay focused on tasks. Good decisions now means I have to make fewer changes later – that’s the theory, anyway…who knows what the internet will be like in another fifteen years…

I’m not aiming for perfection. I’m aiming for something I can be proud of again, instead of embarrassed or awkward. I want something that reflects who I am and what I love better. I think that’s a realistic goal.

Are you happy with your website? What’s your ultimate goal for it?