Spring Clean Your Online Presence

We just turned the clocks one hour forward. Now it is time to spruce up your online garage. We need to start cleaning, organizing, and restructuring the way we do some things. When it comes to handling various online entities and projects, it is very easy to forget to do the “little things.”

There are steps for spring cleaning everything from your basement, closet, and to your computer, but what about your “virtual world?”

Before we get started with the clean up, there are a couple things to note:

• Look to consolidate.
• Look where you can improve.
• Think carefully before deciding to throw away or not.

When sprucing up your online entities, we must check your files on your actual hard drive and what is on your hosting. Just because we may have loads of available hosting space, that doesn’t mean we need to unnecessarily fill it up.

Step 1 of any type of computer/soft copy clean up is to back up everything!

• Back-up your wordpress files.
• Download your themes to your computer.

Create a folder and stuff it all on in there. Once we finish with our cleaning and make sure everything works, we can just throw away or burn it on some disk.

Update to latest versions of all resources (i.e. WordPress, plugins).

• Start from the biggest and work your way out. With WordPress 2.7+ everything should be as simple as one click per update.

Check over all updated sites – Do not wait until you finish everything to see if everything works properly; otherwise, the only way to figure out what the problem is will probably be to reload your backups.

Delete unused and unnecessary files.

• Delete unused themes, unused images, and projects that just never panned out.

Before deleting anything go through a quick analysis, and think what will be the effect if I don’t have this necessary file anymore. Worst comes to worse, you have all the back-ups, so if you decide down the road that you actually needed those files, then you can just reload them again.

Go through you Cpanel (or whatever your hosting uses).

• Delete unused email and ftp accounts.
• Check the status of any domains (or even sites). Are they being used? Can you sell them?
• Check what new scripts or services are being offered.

Delete, restructure, and consolidate.

We have pretty much taken care of the files on your hosting, but now we need to see what is being stored on your computer.

I always like to have a somewhat copy of what is on my hosting on my hard drive, and I always update those files first and then upload them over the holds ones on my hosting.

• Delete the files you deleted in your hosting.
• Delete dead projects or restructure how you can get them done.

Don’t get new folder crazy. The idea is the consolidate these into an efficient and organized structure.

Turn your inbox inside out.

How many times have we just archived an email we thought we need later, but never looked at it. Do you even delete emails?

• Delete emails you don’t need.
• Move emails into its respective folder.
• Make sure you have all the info about your contacts.
• Can you shrink down the number of inboxes?

The goal should be to have an empty inbox when it is all said and done.

Clear the cobwebs from your site.

We have pretty much taken care of all the physical aspects, but now it is time to clean up our actual site(s).

• Check blogroll for dead links, sites you don’t want anymore, and partners who stopped linking back.
• Create new ads, photos, head shots, and any other media you use. Gives your site a quick face lift, and gives readers something new to look at.
• See what ads are working and what not, and make necessary changes.

Updates your social network profiles.

• Change your photo, update your profile, and deal with any pending requests.

Sit back, relax, and enjoy a tip-top shape online presence.

Don’t get recycle bin crazy. You don’t want to have a blank site when it is all done. Just get rid of things you do not need or have no real benefit, and update what needs updating.

Any other spring cleaning tips?