The work of a website owner is never done and it’s not all just blog posts and portfolio updates featuring images of wonderful places and fabulous memories; there’s also a bit of tinkering that goes on around the site from time to time and even though the site isn’t that old in terms of its new travel and photography direction I do tweak things every now and then to see what impact it has.
Website Changes
I’ve removed a few included scripts that came with the theme I’m using on the site after making use of PageSpeed Insights to see if I could identify anything that could be stripped out to improve site responsiveness. I’m not too displeased with how the site performs most of the time but any improvement is worth it.
I’ve changed the home page’s slideshow sequence so that the picture of the Star Princess cruise ship docked at Ushuaia is first now. I like the cool blues. I haven’t quite got around to posting pictures from our trip to Ushuaia yet but it won’t be long now as I’m up to the Falkland Islands at the moment so the southern tip of South America is getting closer.
I’ve made a change to the portfolio items listing so that it grabs the featured image of the most recent item in the list. This keeps those pages fresh even if they’re not updated themselves so long as a portfolio item is added. I’ve also taken to editing and extending the content in the portfolio descriptions when I’m checking that posts are published. A lot of the descriptions are pretty samey as I initially went for targeted keywords but I’m trying to be more natural language-friendly now.
Some people have actually left real comments! I know! As a result I’ve experimentally enabled pingbacks for now. I seem to recall no end of problems with them when I did this once before so this may be a short-lived thing.
Social Media Changes
I’ve created a new Twitter account – @MandMsTravels – which I’m using to post updates from this site. The reason I’m not using my main account is because a lot of people who follow me won’t care and I don’t want to annoy people. I’m not too interested in followers or following counts for that new account; it’s mostly for the searchable words that might drive casual browsers to the site since the days of dedicated fans of sites seems long gone. To that end I’ve decided to post updates from there manually rather than rely on any WordPress plugin for the job. I’m quite pleased that I went to the effort of modifying this site’s header to output meta tags for Twitter cards as the result looks really good, I think.
The addition of the new account has led to a modification of the site’s footer to include a link to it and to make it clearer that there are separate RSS feeds for blog posts and portfolio items.
I’ve started to curate a list on my main Twitter account featuring cruise-related people.
Featured image is taken of the wing of our Wow Air flight back from Iceland because I’ve got nothing in my photo collection that really says "This post is about changes to the website" unsurprisingly.