It is mid-March – time for St. Patrick’s Day, March Madness and, hopefully, the changing of the seasons as winter gives way to spring here in Chicago.
It is also time for change here at Katie Going Global.
One of the biggest things I have been trying to figure out over the last few months is what direction I wanted to take this blog now that I am home. Sure, I still have stuff to write about my 13 months on the road. Of course, I will continue to write about my re-entry experience. And yes, I do still hope to travel as much as I can and share those stories with you.
But I feel like my focus is changing and expanding and I believe my blog needs to evolve as well. As a result, I’d like to share a few changes that are on the horizon.
A new domain name
I was never crazy about my current domain name and as I thought about changing it, I wanted it to reflect all of me, not just the me that loves to travel. What better way to do that than simply use my name as my domain name?
So katieaune.com will soon become katieaune.com – likely in the next week or two.
If everything goes smoothly, you won’t notice much of a difference. The site will be set up to redirect any URLs to the new domain name and the RSS feed should transfer as well. Google may be a little confused for a while so my search traffic may take a hit, but my hope is that my regular readers won’t even really notice (of course, if you’ve linked back to any of my posts from your site and want to take a few minutes to update them once the domain switch happens, that would be awesome…).
A new look
Eventually I will introduce a new logo and slightly revamped design to go along with the new domain name. As part of this, I hope to reorganize things a bit to reflect a few specific areas of focus. Obviously, I will still have a substantial section on travel, but I hope to organize it a little bit better. Chicago will be another focus as I continue to rediscover my adopted hometown. I also plan to reincorporate living gluten-free into the site. Before I left on my trip, I launched a separate site where I planned to write about my experiences living and traveling gluten-free, but I found I just didn’t have the time and energy to maintain two sites. But, I still want to share that information with interested readers, so I will be moving that content back onto this site in its own section.
My goal is that all of these changes will make the site as useful and reader-friendly as possible, in terms of both information and navigation.
I don’t have an exact timeline for this, but I’m hoping to have it complete by summertime.
A new calendar
I have been working off of an editorial calendar since last spring, aiming to post three times each week while I was traveling. When I returned home, I cut that back to twice a week, but I have found my writing has been very inconsistent as I have adjusted to working full-time while also working on some side projects. Going forward, as soon as I finish up my current backlog of posts, I will commit to posting just once a week for the time being. I know, that doesn’t seem like a whole lot, right?
Well, here’s the thing. I have two e-books related to my trip that I really want to write this year. With a full-time job again, I only have so much free time and I am going to need to devote a lot of that time to writing the books if I want to complete even one this year, much less two. Unfortunately, that means cutting back on my blog writing. I’m not saying there won’t be weeks when I might publish two posts, but I am only committing myself to one for the time being.
I’m very excited about these changes (and crossing my fingers that everything goes smoothly) and I hope you’ll enjoy the new look when I eventually roll it out!
