Time for an Annual Website Review

On January 11, 2019 By Isobar ExpeditionsIn Blogging2 Comments

It is important that you take a look at your social media accounts and websites at least on an annual basis. Whether it is your profile photos or information, tag lines, or about pages, information needs to be looked at with a fresh set of eyes on an ongoing basis. Realistically speaking, it is probably worth doing more than just once a year, but that is about the minimum amount of time to let go by and using the start of the new year is an easy way to always remember to get it done.

Whether it is looking at any unintentional clutter on your landing page or making sure that it is easily navigable or looking at the content on your about page and making sure that it is up to date, there are a variety of things that we try to do at this time of year. We are always amazed when we take the time to go to our About page and update it, how much we tend to “set it and forget it”. Since it is often the first place that people visit to learn about who you are, it definitely shouldn’t be such an after thought.

Profile photos are another thing that need to be revisited often and making sure that they are consistent across all of your media sites. Whether you use a photo or something like an avatar, it is important that it isn’t too out of date. Having a photo that is several years old isn’t a true representation of yourself. With that said, it is definitely time for us to update ours as it is a year old at this point. We’re traveling next week, but we expect to get our updates done before the end of the month. Do you have a schedule for updating and refreshing you layout and profile information?

Is It Okay to Recycle Blog Post Material?

On November 2, 2018 By Isobar ExpeditionsIn Blogging10 Comments

We have had our site for a little over three years at this point and during that time we have obviously traveled as much as possible and shared stories from everyplace that we’ve visited. There are times when we’ve looked back at our early days of blogging and thought to ourselves that we could or should have told that particular story differently. Or we’ve looked at a post from our early days and thought to ourselves that we weren’t engaged with as many people back then and should we re-share that experience with a new audience. Sure, we could simply re-blog the old post, but that doesn’t seem the same as taking a new slant on an older post.

We have, at times, realized that there were specific things that we missed about a place that we previously wrote about and then shared that information, but not gone back and looked at our original post from a place and considered doing a fresh take on it. We have, over the years, posted over 700 posts on our site, so the likelihood of people stumbling over old posts is relatively low, but at the same time, we don’t want to have a bunch of redundant material on our site. We do see some older posts being found through search engines, but there are some that just never get viewed after their original posting.

Flying Over the Grand Canyon on Our Recent Flight Home from California

Obviously we strive to always create new and interesting content for our site and want it always to feel informative and fresh. With that said, we don’t travel to new places every week, so we do have to find ways to create new information about places that we have already visited. We usually do that by going into greater detail about a specific site within a city that perhaps we only touched on briefly in our original post or creating a summary of information where we have broken up the information in multiple posts.

On One of the First Trips After Starting Our Site

We have mixed feelings on the thought of recycling old material in a new way. And if we do ultimately decide to create a new post on something we’ve previously talked about, should we delete the old post? Whatever we decide, ultimately we want to make sure that we do it in a way that is stimulating and interesting and doesn’t feel like a repeat.

Do You Celebrate Your Blogiversary?

On July 24, 2018 By Isobar ExpeditionsIn Blogging10 Comments

Technically we started our site three years ago in June, but we didn’t truly start blogging with any consistency until August of that year. In that time, we have posted more than 650 posts on our site and continue to learn new things about blogging on almost a daily basis. In the past, we have never acknowledged the anniversary of our site, mostly because we have been focused on the day-to-day activities of simply sharing our stories and information about the places that we have been visiting. When we started our site, we would have never dreamed that we would spend six months living in Germany or that we would travel to 5 different continents.

Throughout the past few years we have enjoyed all of the interaction that we have had with fellow bloggers, travelers, photographers, and foodies. We try to share a little of ourselves along the way and hopefully not just a dry repetition of facts that could be found anywhere. Every now and then we look back at our older posts and consider updating them now that we know more than we did back when we started, but haven’t taken the time to do so as of yet.

So, this isn’t necessarily an official celebration of our blogiversary, but it is at least a recognition of the fact that it is occurring. Perhaps if we make it to five years we will truly take time to celebrate the moment and might even pop open a bottle of bubbly. Do you celebrate your blogiversaries or do they pass by quietly?