After making massive changes to the garden sites, Ilona’s Garden and the Journal were both given secure https status, and the continued work from changing the permalinks structure, I have also reworked how the site is stacked. Made a new start page, removed excess content from there into the Guidepost tour of the best pages.
Categories are being improved for better clarity and relationship. This was needed in both the Journal and the main site, but especially in the Garden Journal! Blogger had a very awkward style of “labels” that combined tagging and categories, which was garbled even further when imported into WordPress.
Despite the work involved I see all this as an opportunity to improve my site for visitors. That is whole point of my writing, anyway.
So many of the pages needed manual updating, and there were many problems with 404’s. Much of homegardencompanion.com needs attention to this. It is very slow tedious work to update this way, but more than a mere automated fix has been needed since Ilona’s Garden Journal was such an old blog and moved from the Blogger platform to WordPress.
Each page gets refreshed and checked for dead links, sometimes I make new header image, often adding new content or rewriting to better reflect views or opinions. With more than 1000 pages the Journal will take some time to fully see the results.
Ilona’s Garden
On the other hand, Ilona’s Garden has always had a smaller profile, and I am trying to add more pages to it on a regular basis, while updating the older ones. It only has about 346 posts and about 137 pages published. Many more are still in draft, but I would like about 3X that amount, by the end of this year. But I want every post and page to be top quality information and content, so that will not be compromised.
Garden Librarian
The Garden Librarian review site has been on hiatus, but I am getting ready to rework the site and start writing reviews again. I am backing up the site today before moving a new staging copy onto the live site. I always wanted reviews to have a star system and I think I will be happy with the new version of the site. I hope readers will discover it and also be happy.
The Gazebo part had to go and I was sorry to lose it, but just couldn’t make the Joomla platform work for me.
Ilona’s Garden Journal
I moved a number of my Hubpages garden posts to both my Journal and into Ilona’s Garden.
The Journal got an entire site facelift. New theme on the Genesis platform, new logo, and new brand colors…. I post a couple times a month, but as soon as I can catch up with the efforts to improve my main garden site, the journal will get more postings. The difference between the two is that the main site is purely informational, while the journal is more personal with notes on my own garden and trips I make, weather phenomena, etc.
I’m happy with the changes. And to reflect the new domain name (HOMEgardencompanion) there will be more posts on indoor related topics.
Well that the news for now, Friends.
Til next time!
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