How To Have a User-Friendly Hiatus

Written by | Posted in Blogging | Posted on Date 02-04-2009 | Comments 4 Comments
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When you go to a site and it reads ‘HIATUS’, is it annoying? For me it is and I have heard from quite a few other bloggers that it can be irksome for them too.

Usually the reason a person has a hiatus can vary, but usually boils down to the fact that the blogger does not have enough time and blogging is put on the backburner.

There are a couple ways bloggers alert their visitors to when they are having a hiatus.

1. The blogger shuts the site down completely and posts a short note that they are on hiatus and when they will be back.
2. Leave their blog up but do not update for some time.

Both are annoying. Of course, I know that anyone understands that life can get hectic and perhaps blogging is either a chore or just not important. However, from experience, several things can happen during a hiatus.

  • 1. Your Page Rank in Google or Alexa could become worse due to not updating.
  • 2. Your traffic will decrease.
  • 3. You may lose visitors temporarily or permanently. If you are on hiatus often or for extended periods of time, it could be a total turn-off.

To prevent this, totally shutting the site down or lack of inactivity is not a solution. Instead, you should reduce your number of bloggings to at least once or twice a month. Four times a month is great, but twice should adequately suffice. This will keep your site updated enough to keep your visitors coming back.

When you do blog, you do not have to make the blog long and go over every single thing you did. Just highlight some of it.

Related posts:

  1. How to Tidy Your Design and Make it User-Friendly
  2. Dear Facebook – Can You Be Somewhat User-Friendly?
  3. User-Friendly Search Engine

About Nile Flores

Nile is 30 year old female from Southern Illinois. Nile is a mother of 1 son. She is also a web and graphic designer, who exclusively designs using WordPress. She is currently a student working for a Bachelors in Business. She also blogs at WPAddict.net and FamousBloggers.net

Connect with Nile at: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

Nile has written 602 articles at Blondish.net.

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Comments (4)

  • Nile Flores says:
    April 2, 2009 at 4:01 pm

    New blog post: How To Have a User-Friendly Hiatus http://blondish.net/how-to-have-a-user-friendly-hiatus/

    [Original tweet, Topsy page]

    Reply
  • Kayla says:
    April 3, 2009 at 8:44 am

    Sometimes for me, it’s just that I don’t have anything to post about, so I don’t :)

    Reply
  • How to Overcome Bloggers Block | blondish.net says:
    April 3, 2009 at 1:49 pm

    [...] block, where you do not know what to write. It kind of ties into the article I previously wrote, How to Have A User-Friendly Hiatus as one point was missed, the fact that some people run out of things to [...]

    Reply
  • chanel says:
    April 5, 2009 at 11:03 am

    Great advice. I always wanted to know what’s the point of shutting the whole site down, if you’re not going to blog. I would just make a blog stating I will be away for awhile and leave my site up so other entities (like archives and etc) can be accessed still.

    chanel’s last blog post..rose petals anyone?

    Reply

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