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The Organised Approach to Websites, Part 5: Your site's future
< The Organised Approach to Websites, Part 4: Changing your formula | The Organised Approach to Websites |
This post is part of a series.Previous entries: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.
Photo by Luc (a.k.a. ldleeuw).
Where do you see your site in 6 months? 1 year? 3 years?
I don't this know for certain, but I'd make a guess that many sites don't really have a long term plan. Maybe someone was bored one day and decided to start up a blog. Or someone had a great idea and jumped right into it without thinking "how should I do this?"
That doesn't automatically mean the site will fail. However, it can mean you run into problems that you didn't see coming because you didn't have a plan. Then again, some problems just come along that even a plan might not have prevented.
With blogging, perhaps one of the biggest potential issues is a lack of motivation to keep posting. What would you do if you suddenly lost interest in your site, or perhaps you suffered a major downturn and people simply stopped visiting? Would you carry on regardless? Would you take a break and think about what to do? Would you just give up?
You can have a plan. You can have a vague idea with no plan whatsoever. Or you can believe in yourself. It's up to you how you map your future. Will a plan help you through the bad times?
Five sites and their possible futures
I asked a few people where they saw their sites in 6 months, 1 year and 3 years. Here are their replies. (Some were quite long so I had to edit them - apologies!) Thank you all for the comments!1. Realistic ambitions
My blog has evolved in ways I never would have expected. A year before now I would not have predicted I would have changed from blogging as a journal/diary to blogging with drawings at least as much as I write.
I can't see myself making many changes in six months. Changes to the look of the blog of course. I am already thinking I've had enough of the tulips. Six months isn't very long away for any really big changes. Just for fun... I predict by this time next year I will be blogging an advice column. That's something else I always thought would be fun and interesting. Certain people have been mislead into thinking I'm wise so I might even pull that off.
In three years... I've often said I would never run ads. In three years I could have become an ad running mogul with a summer cottage and a limo driver to tour me around while I spend all my ill gotten loot.
Hard to make predictions cause I don't plan ahead much. I don't look back very often either. It's so nice to be right here where the good parts are fresh and I can choose to ignore the bad parts.
Laura - http://thatgrrlca.blogspot.com
2. Technical goals
When I started DomestikGoddess.com about 3 years ago, it was simply as a hobby -- an experiment in this thing called blogging. I set it up on a free blogspot site, on the spur of the moment and without a clear goal in mind. I don't think it would have been possible at that point to look 3 years down the line and know how the blog would grow and evolve, or to foresee the major role that blogging would come to play for me professionally. To look ahead another 3 years may not be possible. Things change so rapidly on the internet: how can we know what opportunities and technologies will be available to bloggers in that future?
One year, however; that's a different story. My vision for DomestikGoddess.com a year down the road is still not as clear as I'd like, but some goals are in place. To begin with, DomestikGoddess.com will be moving over to Majestic CMS and getting a bit of a facelift. The time I spend now in updating WordPress and all the individual plugins from various different authors will be reinvested in my favourite part of blogging -- seeking out interesting products, blogs, artists, ideas and other adventures to share with my readers.
DomestikGoddess.com gets a good proportion of its traffic from search engines, at present, and I'm keen to shift that a bit more towards repeat visitors and subscribers. To that end, too, a year from now there will most likely be a special area with enriched content, downloads, and so on, for registered members of the site. I have a thought that the "Category" areas that exist now might become semi-independent mini-blogs with separate RSS feeds, so readers who are interested in one specific topic can choose to target that interest instead of receiving every update.
So I have a general idea of how I'd like to see my blog evolve and grow within the next year, but this particular blog will always be something of an ongoing experiment in blogging generally. What I learn here in terms of blogging skills and experience, I can take away to my clients' blogs and put it to work for them.
Jen - http://www.domestikgoddess.com
3. Believing in yourself
In 6 months my site will hopefully still be going, as I imagine it will be. One year from now becomes more hazy. Lives change fast and I'm not immune to that fact. I have struggled to keep up with my blog recently, so I can only imagine what may happen in a year's time. I would like to see my blog going in a positive direction, with guest bloggers contributing when I'm too busy.
The two year projection seems like dog years for a blog. I know the lifespan of blogs typically run a few years. Those that withstand the test of time really have something special, and I believe my blog will be among them. Two years from now the blog will likely be more fully developed. I will have worked out any kinks in scheduling posts, figuring out topics, and gaining subscribers. The blog should be moving forward largely on its own momentum.
Jason - http://www.jasonboom.com
4. Natural growth
In 6 months, I don't really see my personal blog going much farther than where I have it now. I would like a few more regular readers. For example, I have about 5 people who I know will come whether I comment on their blog or not, and I would like to increase that to 10.
In a year; I don't have ambitious goals for my blog, but I would like to completely re-vamp my portfolio (http://www.fragileheart.com) and maybe move it over to Wordpress and display everything that I had planned to display on the site when I first created the current layout in 2006.
In 3 years; as much of a planner as I am... I don't have an answer for this part of the question. I'd like to say that my website will be a good source of income both via design and advertising media but it wouldn't bother me if that didn't happen, and I don't have a game plan to make this happen!
fragileheart - http://www.fragileheart.com/journal
5. Leadership
In 6 months, I want my message for multidisciplinary programming to spread far and wide. That sounds vague... so subscriber numbers to hit 3 digits? That's about as concrete as I could get with measurable goals. I don't think relationships and friendships can be measured though... so not a big thing.
In a year's time, I have a group of people supporting my message (or cause). They care deeply about the benefits of great programming and thus technology on mankind. They exchange ideas and improve each other's works, and my site acts as a medium for this.
In 3 years? A bit too far in the future... Those great programmers from before, with their multitude of talents (and in programming of course!) will do fantastic work to make the world a better place. I believe technology can do that.
Vincent - http://www.polymathprogrammer.com
And finally, my own thoughts...
I definitely intend to have my site around for years to come. My ultimate goal is to make blogging and website management accessible to anyone, not just the technically-minded people. My blog is a major part of that journey and I hope it helps out more people as the years go by.What do you think?
Where do you see your site in 6 months, 1 year, 3 years?Also - this is the end of my five-part series. What did you think of it?
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Comments on The Organised Approach to Websites, Part 5: Your site's future
I started blogging without a thought for where it would lead me. Which is probably not all that uncommon because I wasn't aware at the time just how big the blogging world really is.
When I moved my blog to self hosted, I guess in a way it was a commitment to blogging more long term. BUT, I've never really thought about long-term goals.
I guess the only long-term goal I DO have is that I would like to make a part-time income from my blogs. Nothing huge but enough that the pressure for me to becoming a working mum is eased and that I can in some way "justify" the amount of time I put into blogging.
I think this would be a good thing for me to really spend some time on. First, I need to go back and review your posts. I've been away so trying to "catch up" a little.
fragileheart - thanks! As for the posts not showing on the home page, that's intentional - I only put the first part on the home page to encourage people to subscribe. And my subscribers have definitely gone up.
Lightening - one of the things that this approach can help with is helping you to make better use of your time. Being organised might sound like it's a lot of up front effort to some people, but actually, it saves you a lot of time in the long run. All five parts of this series were planned on paper following the approach I recommended in part 1. The posts were much, much easier to assemble than any of the posts I've written before. You'll also see that they all have photos - two of them I took myself, three came from Flickr (obviously with a link to each author). I have certainly found this series useful, and I'm very interested to hear how other people get on when they follow this advice. So if you do get a chance to read the earlier parts and you make some changes on your blog as a result, I'd love to hear how you get on.
Thanks for the comments. :)
Great series Ben! Have only been able to read all of them right now. It's still not showing up on your front page though?
Thanks again for asking me to partake, it was my pleasure to help you out!