Reviewing My Own Site

I'm taking on the task of a redesign effort. The template should be applied to this site first, but it's something that I'd like to actually like to apply to my other sites as well so that I can have some consistency as far as manageability. Certainly color scheme and some basic elements can change, but the idea is that I'd like to do it right the first time so I don't have to keep on re-working things in the future.

As part of this effort, I actually looked at some of the content on this blog and I find some of my patterns interesting.

I've found that I spend a good deal of time writing about content certain categories, and no time at all or very little time writing about other categories. This leaves some of my category pages pretty slim - to the point where it doesn't make sense to even have them in place. I didn't spend much time thinking about categories - I think I just blew a few out in 15 minutes as I set up the blog originally. While I've been consistently working on a lot of different projects, I've also found that I'm not updating anyone as to the status of those projects, thereby alienating some of my user community and leaving the impression that I'm not very reliable.

Part of the problem is really that this is a blog, and I write things without much forethought, zero editorial review - not even much proofreading. I don't plan my content long term, what little planning I have done has not been followed up on. I don't really have any problem with that - like I said, this is just a blog and I didn't really have much intention of doing anything here other than putting together a personal journal. But the implications that this behavior has on other sites tells me that I need to find a better way to manage the editorial process and to monitor my own progress at developing out sections of a given web site - perhaps even holding off on publication of certain sections until there is a queue of articles lined up for publication.

I like the idea of a publication interface, but I've had a hard time finding any CMS that really serves as a real content management system. Certainly there are a lot of choices out there if you are looking for a particular feature set, and plenty that serve the need for daily journaling or news publication, but there is a big empty space for webmasters who are looking for a well thought out publication system that encompasses a wide enough feature set.

I've also noticed I've gotten into the habit of nightly article writing and just a single article each night. This kind of process simply doesn't fly. There was a period when I was really busy and I hadn't actually updated this site for a matter of weeks. You would think I'd have lost all my repeat visitors, but my stats have shown that my visitor level actually increased significantly during that time frame. I'm not sure what to make of that.

Another problem I've had is that as my subject matter choices have changed, I haven't done a great job of maintaining the interest of existing users. People might like the nerd articles, but who knows when they are coming back. They might like my web site optomization information, but who knows when something new is coming along. As my visitor level increases and I look to extend my daily responsibilities in new directions, I have to maintain publication regularity in regards to common subject matter threads. It really makes sense to spend an entire day working on a set of articles rather than spending 20 minutes a day writing whatever happens to come to mind.