One of my goals for this year was to give this blog a fresh new look. Some people may accuse me of cheating but I have decided to keep the current design and merely give it a bit of a clean up instead.

I don’t think I am cheating. Removing it from my goal post and replacing it with a wish for a funky HTC Sense smart phone without anyone knowing, now THAT would be cheating. 

Faster! Faster! Faster!

My main aim was to speed up the blog. I think it loaded pretty fast before but I knew that it could do with being even faster. So I removed a lot of the sidebar widgets that I really didn’t need.

I also decided to show a teaser for every post on the home page instead of the entire post, I’m hoping that this will stop the blog from lagging when it loads.

I removed the RSS feed counter and the subscribe by email image and instead I created a section in the sidebar with an RSS button, Twitter button and a Facebook button. Above that is the mailing list subscription box.

“Sorry! Did You Say Mailing List?”

Yes I did. After months and months and months of saying it I have finally launched my mailing list. I haven’t done it with much fanfare, and if you sign up there is no free offer yet, but the important thing is that I have finally launched it. 

Comment Baby!

I didn’t do too much with the comments section as I was pretty happy with how it currently looked (well, apart from wishing there were more comments). But I did add the CommentLuv plugin as an extra thank you to people who comment.

I also altered the images next to the comments so if you don’t have an image associated with your name it shows up a random default picture which is not the normal boring grey one.

I’ve Ad Enough!

The biggest complaint I received from readers was that I was displaying too many adverts. When I decided to work on the design lowering the number of adverts was my first priority. I have reduced the numbers from 15 to 7 on a post.

I am working on getting this even lower.

Behind The Scenes

I also gave the admin panel a good going over as well. I scaled back on the amount of plugins I was using. I had 37, which I think was mental! I had over ten plugins running that I was not even using.

Well? What Do You Think?

I am always looking to improve the blog in every way possible so I am always happy to hear from people with their views on what they think of my blog.

Are the changes good? Are they bad?

What would you change if this was your blog? Please comment and let me know. 

Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay