The diary of Dad

I’m a little scared of change. Some of this fear is completely illogical whilst dreading some changes makes perfect sense.

I’ve been writing this blog for two and a half years and it’s fair to say I have not really moved with the times. The layout of the site has always remained the same and I’ve tried to keep a consistent writing style. The numerous typos, spelling mistakes and grammatical errors in every post are obviously intended too.

So why have things here never changed? Only those who were around when I first started writing will remember a post named ’why did the blog vanish?’ I wrote this post a couple of weeks into my my blogging journey and the content of it explains the problems I have faced ever since.

I’ll cut a very long story short. The blog vanished as I had attempted to make a very small change to the layout of a page. If I remember correctly, I was simply trying to change the background colour from black to a light blue but things went wrong. I somehow managed to first lose all of my writing and then end up with a very nice looking website advertising a fictional restaurant. It was a disaster that took a lot of time and a painful amount of research to fix and explains why my site has always remained the same ever since.

Now, regular readers may have noticed that the site does indeed look different today. I’ve made a few changes that are huge by my standards and hopefully I have created a far better functioning website moving forward.

Since day one, I’ve always spent time reading up on how make a website a success but fear of losing my work so far had prevented me making any necessary changes. I had reached the almost slightly embarrassing point where Google was actually popping up a warning when people clicked on the site that it may be spam due to so many errors despite knowing myself what I was doing wrong. I took the risk this week and now even though the changes may look tiny, here’s what I’ve done. Try not to nod off.

I’ve moved away from having a huge image at the top of every post. As much as I liked these pictures they really slow down the website and can even stop pages from loading at all. This sounds simple but there is a very long and dull reason why this was extremely complicated but it simply had to be done.

I’ve added menus to every page. hopefully you can see it somewhere at the top of the page and you can now navigate the site far easier than before. I’ve sectioned everything I have wrote into neat categories so that if you want to find any post, it’s never more than a couple of clicks away.

I’ve updated both my Home and contact pages. My homepage was still saying that Robbie was close to turning two so it’s easy to see how outdated that was! I really had let these pages slip over the years. This was the easy part.

In my first few months of writing I regularly ran audits to check the website’s health but had not done so for a while. A quick scan helpfully informed me that I had 822 more changes to make.

I’m not going to pretend I have fixed every single issue but I have been a very busy man doing everything I can! These have ranged from deleting comments from old posts with fake web addresses through to real hardcore technical stuff that I had never dreamt I would be doing when I first started typing years ago. I have added links from each post to another to help Google robots crawl my website and submitted them a new sitemap. That whole sentence sounds ridiculous and would have made me laugh years ago. Most importantly though, I have managed to do all of this without deleting any of my site (I think.)

Now here’s a little confession. I’m no angel and the title of this post may be a small white lie. There is certainly an element of testing going on as although I have been able to edit old stuff successfully, I’m not entirely sure how this post will appear and I’ll be keen to give it a read even if nobody else is!

I’m hoping I’ll simply do the writing and little things such as menus, Amazon affiliate disclosure (right at the bottom) and my TOTS100 badge will all smartly add themselves. Hopefully you will even have been asked about cookies when you got here, though I don’t have any I’m afraid.

There are changes everywhere but the general aim is for the page to be cleaner, sharper and far easier to read. I guess time will tell whether this has any effect but I am glad that you, my guinea pig, have found this test! If there are any glaring obvious mistakes or you click on anything and get an error message, please let me know. I’m still learning.

Thanks for reading! Dad.