It might be just slightly too late to call it spring cleaning, nonetheless it was time for some cleaning. I haven’t paid much attention to this particular site for the past couple of years while I worked on other cool projects, and it was long overdue for some renovations.
The main reason I hadn’t been posting much on this site was the huge pile of upfront work that had to be done before I could get back to writing – specifically switching web hosts, deleting old content, choosing a new theme, wading through spam comments, and doing a lot of design stuff.
Before I got back into posting I needed to make Fourth Floor Marketing into a home again, and that meant starting from scratch in many regards. Before I did anything else I decided that I needed to go through all of my old posts and either fix them up or simply delete them – the result was deleting more than half of my older content. The purpose of deleting all this content was to make it so that the only content on my site is stuff that I think serves a purpose – which also helps my SEO at the same time.
Google posted the following in regards to old content just after the Google Panda update:
“…if you believe you’ve been impacted by this change you should evaluate all the content on your site and do your best to improve the overall quality of the pages on your domain. Removing low quality pages or moving them to a different domain could help your rankings for the higher quality content.”
After cleaning out all of the old stuff I also needed to update the theme, as the old one was from 2007 and it was pretty clear from looking at it. I decided this time around to get a theme that I won’t have to constantly try to fix. I decided to go with a child theme based on the Genesis Framework (StudioPress) which I edited a bit to look more blog-like (this theme was originally intended to be for newspapers/magazines).
Between editing content, redesigning the site, adding new widgets, social features, and analytics packages it took about 30 hours to get the site back in working order (it was pretty messed up). The upfront time investment was definitely worthwhile as it feels like I am home again (just in a cooler, more modern home) and I am certainly glad to be back. Expect some good stuff in the near future.
