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What to do when you start hating your website?

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After a while of having a blogging website you may start to hate your website. It begins to feel like work. You get tired of seeing your home page. You get ill when it comes up in Google Search results. 

Evaluate your site: Why did you start it in the first place? What were you trying to accomplish? Who was your target audience? Did you ever reach them?

Do you still want to do this?: If after evaluating the your site, do you still want to keep doing this?

Stay the course or Is it time for a new direction?: Is it time to focus your site on a new topic that interests you? Or maybe it is time to get refocused on the topic it was intended to talk about. If you have followers to your site or even subscribers, you can’t afford to change topics with out getting consensus from your audience that your new direction will fit with them. That is unless it really is time for a revamp of your site and your ideas.

If you decided to stay the course, how are you going to revitalize your website?

Here are some ways to revitalize your site:

Site Redesign Time: Perhaps it is time to revamp your old and dated looking site. Okay, maybe it isn’t old and dated but it is an eyesore to you as you have grown tired of looking at it. If you are like some who spend all their time and creative energy helping others on their sites, maybe it is time to break out some of your best ideas for your own site. Or maybe you need to call in someone else who you trust to suggest or even implement a new design. Yes, this may cost money but it may be worth the return on investment if you use your site as a source of income. If you have followers or subscribers who you have built a trust with, perhaps use them as market research to help assist in your new design. Maybe it is time for a new font and new backgrounds.

Guest Bloggers: If there are other bloggers who are you aren’t really competing with but who have a similar view to your topics as you, invite them to blog on your site from time to time. Perhaps it is just a one time thing they do for free or maybe if this is going to turn into some type of frequent gig, perhaps you can set up some type of revenue sharing to pay them based on the amount of traffic they draw to your site. Granted a recent article by Matt Cutts saying Guest blogging is dead may convince you this is a dying or dead idea. However, sometimes being willing to allow others to post on your site helps improve your credibility. Being able to say that someone else is also a subject matter expert on your same topic of choice and you aren’t intimidated by (at least you don’t admit it anyway) others who know something about your subject of choice.

Change Topics for a Bit: Maybe you have beat your preferred topics into the ether and it is time to at least for a short period of time, change topics. Maybe you just change and do a variation on your usual theme. Maybe your site is about new technology and the latest gadgets. Perhaps for a while you should blog about what happen to the gadgets you used to review or promote. Or maybe you talk about memory lane and the devices of yesteryear that fascinated you before any device became smart.

Time for a new Name/Site: It may seem extreme but maybe you just want to start over with a new name. You can register a new domain name and set up a redirect to point everyone who tries to visit the “old site” to the “new site”. It may seem drastic but after so much hard work, do you really want to abandon all you have put into it?

I hate my website and I wish it had never been born!

Do you know how may websites have come and gone? The Internet Archive seems to only remember those that actually managed to change a bit from zero to one. If your site never made a difference, then who will miss it? Shut it down. Or maybe you had that great site that was a hit for a bit. Is it a one hit wonder? You had that one link that every one visited and then just like the latest trend, it stopped trending one day. Or you are just sick and tired of the site. If you are really ready to pull the plug, first you have to stop promoting it. Now. Stop Now! No more Twitter posts, no more links to your Facebook profile about your latest post (that was now a month or twelve ago). Stop telling friends and family and your followers about your site. Don’t renew your domain name. Eventually the site will die from Internet bit rot. All of your ones will turn to zeros.

Okay, maybe I don’t hate it all that much after all.

If you really think about it, you don’t hate your site that much do you? If not, go back to the top and try again. Maybe it is time for a revamp. Do you really want to remove your digital presence from the Internet? Probably not. It is time to get focus and get it back in gear. With a little thought and patience, you can turn your site around again.

Christian | Father | Tech Evangelist | Author | Public Speaker | Future TEDx speaker |WordPress Aficionado * I am the author of "WordPress: Setup to Website". I love all things tech and gadgets and I probably have an opinion about it which some people seek out. Follow @aroyrichardson