Anti-SEO Pro-Usefulness

WordPress is a blog but many of us have twisted it to gain Google search efficiency – maybe it is worth forgetting all about that and think of ways that it can be made more useful.

I have not done much with WordPress for some time. The last job was led by my efforts of conforming to SEO and essentially stripping WordPress down to its core and looking at the code to make use of custom taxonomies to create a review site. The only reason I stopped was because I could not in the end control the multitude of URLs that might be created once you have 100s of products, multiplied by each of whatever factors are created for them. Of course, this was at a time when this was severely frowned on. I created a site that had a handful of lamp products from Amazon and didn’t return since…

I miss playing with the code however and want to find a project that will take me back there.

I think I will refresh this site first of all. I want to go back to basics and not worry at all about any Google preferences. I want to look at this site in a new way and make changes because they are actually useful.

WordPress has two taxonomies that have always been there, posts and pages. Even though for the sake of SEO we took out the URL practices of having when the post was created easily visible, I feel now this has been a big mistake. A post having the date it was created is essential to the purpose of the blog. It actually shows what was going on at a particular time, like a journal. Posts are not meant to be full web pages of information, they should be fleeting instances of things, they are the actions of a day, the momentary thoughts that appear at a certain time, a certain place.

Pages are meant to be the structured place. This is where you might categorise, formalise, tidy up the thoughts that appear in the posts. These are the summaries, the well thought out essays, the complete lists, that get built up over many of the posts that appear.

The relationship between the pages and the posts was never really very clear, the linkage I have seen used anywhere so far, though maybe I should look at some of the thought leaders in this area. Whoever they may be?

I want to restructure WordPress so that it works for me, for my life, for the projects that I undertake, a means of holding together, the central point of the life I wish to lead. WordPress was meant to be a blog – what is a blog, what is its real purpose…

Very soon I will break all the URLs here and reform them to how I please. I know Google will drop me like a stone, but I really don’t care to live under these rules any more. I want to redefine the whole meaning of what having a blog is all about – adding things that make it useful. The pages may be picked up later, they may become search engine fodder, but they might take time to be built and I imagine will not be useful for some time.

It would be good to shake this all up tbh…

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