Old Content? Refresh & Upcycle!

Sometimes, the shoemaker has no shoes. Since I am a web designer and work with websites all day long, you’d think I would take care of my own website as well. Wrong.

In 2018, 20 years after I hand-coded the very first iteration of my site, I finally redesigned the thing and brought it to its current state.

Granted, my site went through many versions since I first launched it, but until 2017, it was still an old non-responsive HTML-based website that looked terrible on mobile, with a separate WordPress-powered blog on my domain (that blog was once hacked and blacklisted by Norton Securities. Yes, really, it happened to me.)

What I was also dealing with was a lot of old content and the question of what to do with it during the redesign: delete, refresh & upcycle or rewrite? What helped me in what seemed like a huge undertaking was that over the years, I had accumulated a lot of evergreen content that could easily be refreshed and moved over to the new site.

You can use your older content in many ways without having to delete it or rewrite it from scratch. This is called upcycling, meaning the same content is refreshed and then repurposed on various platforms. As a best practice, schedule to go over your site regularly to flag outdated content. And when writing new content, make sure that it is as timeless as…