Although many of you probably haven’t noticed, I’ve made several small changes and tweaks to my website over the last couple of weeks. The most visible are the new links and images in the sidebar (yes please, take a minute to scroll down and look at everything!)
It’s nothing major at all, but as I was making some of these small tweaks, I realized that I’ve never done any sort of “instruction manual post” about all the in’s and out’s of my website.
Of course, the simple instructions would be:
Read post
Comment on post
Share post on social media
Repeat daily
However, there are so many cool features on my blog that I figured a full-length post was needed to share everything in one nice, neat, organized place. My plan is to come back and update this post as my life and this blog change, and I’m hoping it will be a great resource for both new and seasoned readers.
Whether today is your very first time visiting my blog or you’ve been coming back for years, I think there’s a good chance you’ll learn something new about me or my blog in today’s post!
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For starters, I’m often asked by new readers: “Where should I start?”and by veteran readers: “Where can I find ____?” and I suppose after 4 years and thousands of blog posts, it might seem a little overwhelming to know just where to go on my blog — especially if you’re looking for something specific.
So, I’ve created a new “START HERE” button towards the top of my right sidebar… and, as of this morning, that button links to THIS post 
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About My Blog:
Andrea Dekker is a brand, a business, and a blog that focuses on simplifying REAL life for real families with real budgets, real schedules, real homes, and real lives.
I started this blog (formerly known as “Simple Organized Living”) back in the summer of 2010, and rebranded to AndreaDekker.com in April of 2013. You may read more about the rebranding process here –> part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.
My hope is that AndreaDekker.com will be a resource to motivate, encourage, and inspire YOU to continually make small positive changes in your home, your family, and your life.
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Searching My Blog:
In my opinion, there’s really no point in me blogging about various topics if you can’t find what you want to read about… so I’ve worked REALLY hard over the years to create several simple ways for you to search my blog and quickly find the content you’re looking for.
If you’d just like to browse around, you can check out my entire blog archives here.
If you’re looking for posts in one particular category, you can click here to scroll through the various categories I’ve blogged on over the past 4 years.
If you’re looking for a specific recipe, head on over to my Virtual Recipe Box and you should find what you’re looking for.
For everything else, the fastest and easiest way to find whatever you’re looking for on my blog is to use the handy search bar in the blue navigation menu towards the top of my site.
All you need to do is type in whatever you’re looking for (I typed in “DIY Cleaners” for the purpose of this example) and click “search”. It should only take a second or two to populate a whole bunch of resources from my blog.
If it doesn’t come up with anything, you could try rephrasing the search (like typing “Homemade Cleaners” instead of “DIY Cleaners”) but usually, if it doesn’t come up with anything, that means it’s a topic I haven’t posted on yet.
In that case, feel free to shoot me an email (andrea@andreadekker.com) and let me know about the topic you’d be interested in learning more on. If it’s something others have also requested and something I feel confident I can write about, I’ll almost always start drafting ideas and put it in my list of upcoming posts.
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Using The Navigation Bars:
I currently have 2 “navigation bars” on my blog. The brown navigation bar is at the very top of my site — it provides links to all the “extras” on my blog, not any of the blog posts.
Then there’s the main navigation bar — which is the horizontal blue bar directly below the Andrea Dekker logo. There are 5 main categories for my blog: LIFE, HOME, FOOD, FAMILY, WORK.
My main navigation bar also has 5 different sub-navigation menu to hopefully make it super duper easy to find the type of posts you’re looking for. If you mouseover or click on any one of the main categories, a list of sub-categories shows up below the main categories for more specific content.
And at the very end of every post, you will see different links for “Filed Under” and “Labels”. If you click on any of those links, you’ll open a listing of posts with the same category or tag.
So, for example, if you searched for DIY cleaners and then clicked on one of the post titles, you will probably see these links at the VERY END of that post.
The links above are not clickable, but in the live post, you could click on “Frugal Living” to then be taken to a huge listing of all the frugal living posts I’ve written over the past 4 years.
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Saving and/or Printing Content from My Blog:
I’m often asked if there is an option for printing or saving content from my blog — and while I personally don’t encourage printing my posts (I’m anti paper clutter, remember) I know there are situations when a hard copy of the information is just easier.
So, at the top right corner of every blog post, you should see a “Clean Print” button.
When you click on that button, it will open that blog post in a new window (just the blog post, not any of the sidebar stuff) and allow you to remove images and even remove paragraphs you aren’t interested in keeping. So you can literally just keep the information you’re interested in — and then print it, save it to DropBox or your computer, email it to yourself or someone else, etc.
It’s a pretty handy feature if you like to print or save information from the internet.
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Another great way to save information that you’d like to reference later is to Pin it to Pinterest.
If there’s a house project, an organizing tip, or a recipe you want to save for later, simply mouseover any of the images in the post and click on the red “Pin” button that should appear in the top left corner of the photo.
By clicking on that Pin button, a Pinterest window will appear on top of your current window with the image and title of the post. It will allow you to choose what Pinterest Board you save this post to as well as share it on Facebook or Twitter.
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Saving and/or Printing Recipes:
As I mentioned above, I don’t encourage printing excess paper; however I do totally understand why you might want to print or save a recipe. There is something about having the physical copy right there in front of you that seems to eliminate error (at least for me!)
Because of that, almost all the recipes on my site are also formatted as a Google Doc and can be easily saved or printed with one click of your mouse. Simply scroll down to where the recipe begins in the post and click on the {print recipe} link to open just the recipe in a separate window.
It’s formated like a recipe card so if you do want to print it out, you can then cut it out and glue it onto a recipe card or put it in your recipe binder.
You can also save it to your Google Docs (if you use Google Docs).
And even if you don’t want to save or print the recipe, this is still a really great way to view the recipe without all the photos or sidebar information from my blog. This is how I personally cook from my blog because there are less distractions and I don’t need to scroll down to finish reading the recipe.
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Sharing Content from My Blog:
I have a REALLY cool feature on my blog that most of you probably have never noticed before. If you want to share any of my content or my posts via Facebook or Twitter, all you need to do is copy the text you want to post (like the title of the post or a quote from the post) and a little box will automatically pop up asking you if you’d like to share that content to Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ — it doesn’t get much easier than that!
Alternatively, you can scroll down to the end of the post to share the blog post link on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or any number of social media sites. You can also email the full post + link to yourself if you don’t want to mess with the Clean Print option I described above.
Using My Sidebar:
Yes, there are several advertisements in my sidebar (which, allow me to provide everything on my blog completely free to you) but there are also TONS of valuable resources in the sidebar.
For starters, I’ve recently highlighted the most commonly questioned clutter hot-spots and categorized all my blog posts about each specific areas — which means you can read ALL my advice on paper clutter, emotional clutter, clothes clutter, kids clutter, and electronics clutter simply by clicking on the links in my sidebar (or the links below)!
The sidebar also has a list of my most recent posts from all my categories if you just want to catch up on the “current news” and a list of my most popular posts if you’re interested in what everyone else is interested in
One of MY favorite things about my sidebar is… my list of “Favorites” (big shocker!)
Towards the bottom of the sidebar, you’ll see several images with titles below the image. Each image links to one of my favorite posts or group of posts (see below as an example of some of the images currently in my sidebar.)
My goal has always been to update these several times a year — but I haven’t done it as much as I like. Either way, it’s still fun for me to highlight a few seasonal posts or other groups of posts I think might be of interest to you.
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Stay Connected With Me:
If you have a question about a specific post or want to share something related to a specific post, leaving a comment on that particular post is definitely the best and fastest way to get my attention. I’ll see that comment come through immediately and can quickly respond when I have a free moment.
And whenever I respond to your comment, you will automatically get my response emailed directly to your inbox.
Also, if you check the box next to “notify me of all follow-up comments via email” you will not only get an email when I respond to your comment, but also when anyone else leaves a comment on that post. So if you want to stay part of the discussion, you can check that box. You can unsubscribe later via the “manage the subscriptions” link.
If you want to connect with me OUTSIDE my blog, Facebook is probably the best way as that’s pretty much the only social media outlet I hang out on.
And if you’d just like to send me an email… please, do so! andrea@andreadekker.com
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More About Me and My Family:
Here’s the link to my full “about page” with tons more information about me, my family, my blog, my VA work, etc.
Here’s the link to our full farmhouse tour (which I will update as we make more progress).
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More Resources:
If you haven’t already subscribed to my blog, I’d love it if you subscribed via RSS Feed or via email using the box below!
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Also, if you’re on Facebook a fair amount, you can like my page to get all the blog updates that way.
My Complete Archives (well over 1000 posts since mid 2010)
All my blog Categories (a simple listing of every topic covered on my blog)
My Virtual Recipe Box (hundreds of simple, frugal, family-friendly recipes)
My Services (just in case you’re interested in hiring me!)
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I’m sure there’s something I’m forgetting to mention… but as I mentioned above, I’ll be updating this post regularly as things change.
If there’s anything you have a question on or can’t figure out, or if any part of my blog isn’t working properly for you, please leave a comment or send me an email. I’ll do my best to answer your questions or fix the issues ASAP.
Thanks for your continued support!
top photo credit