Every now and again you realise that things need to update, as time continues on its constant asymptote into the future, things begin to get old. As you learn and grow, your goals may begin to change as your pathway begins to reveal itself.
SavingNinja is almost a year old now, I think it’s about time for a refresh. Technology advances all the time and people’s needs change right along with it. It’s probably a good idea to think about a serious website update at least once per year.
So, this is my ‘backlog’ post. I’ll be detailing all of the changes that I want to make and what my vision is for the future of SavingNinja.
Pillar Posts
One thing that SavingNinja is sorely missing are pillar posts. These are posts that depict your main philosophies and strategy. I currently have zero posts explaining what Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE) actually is. I just assumed my audience would already know.
Pillar posts are important for your brand as it helps people understand who you are and what beliefs you hold. They should be your root posts (hence the name) for each section of your brand, with all of your other posts leading off from them.
These posts are also important for people who make it to SavingNinja who have no idea what FIRE means. For example, a lot of my Google search traffic is coming from posts that are unrelated to finance. These people should be able to quickly and easily find a pillar post and learn about the FIRE movement with very little effort. If they can’t, I’ve failed at promoting the movement (which is one of this websites main goals).
Structure
My categories and top menu are currently a mess, this was expected as before starting the site, I had no idea what type of posts I would be writing. Now, a year on, it’s a lot easier to categorise my content.
I want to fit all of the content on SavingNinja into these 5 main categories:
These categories will also be book-ended with ‘pillar posts’ as described above.
As well as these main categories, I’ll also have a couple of others:
Updates - For posts such as this one and any other announcements.
Reviews - For book, software, or product reviews.
These categories should clearly (and simply) define all of the SavingNinja content. It will give readers a chance to compartmentalise the site into what they want to read about, with the pillar posts guiding them.
Theme Update
Although I really like the current SavingNinja theme (and I did pay for it), it doesn’t have as many features as I would like, it’s actually quite an old and clunky theme. I’ll be looking for a more feature rich theme which suites the SavingNinja brand, and now that I know I’m sticking with blogging, I don’t mind paying a bit more for a good one.
Along with the theme update I’ll be looking at creating a better quality logo and header artwork, I may even get them professionally done as I know a few really awesome professional designers.
More Experimentation!
I love starting new side-hustles and experimenting. One of the reasons that SavingNinja was born was to document these experiments. I still have so much that I want to try! Kindle publishing, affiliate websites, Udemy courses, to name a few. It’s just finding the time to slot these in. Maybe my first experiment should be how to manage my time better? :)