Last Year's Top Posts {and What They Taught Me}

Not only is the turn of a year a great time for looking ahead and setting goals, but it’s also a good time for looking back and reflecting.

My husband and I have been looking over our blogs this weekend, noting trends, and discussing how we can better serve our readers.

It helps us in making plans for the future to see what has seemed most helpful in the past. To do this we start here:

Our Top 10 Posts and Pages of 2014:

Interestingly, eight of the ten include some sort of printable. My readers obviously love printable resources, which works out nicely, since I love making them. You’ll be seeing a lot more where those came from this year.Also watch for an updated listing on our printables page, which should make it much easier to find what you need when you need it.

Two of our top ten posts deal specifically with raising children and two deal with marriage. You’ll continue to see lots of parenting pointers on our family website, but the vast majority of the posts we write on marriage are currently being published on our personal blogs. Wives will find encouragement and Biblically-based advice on my site, Loving Life at Home, while men will be challenged and built up in their roles as husbands and fathers by following Doug’s blog, All Truth is God’s Truth.

Our Christmas Letters got lots of traffic, especially during the month of December. I suspect this is not so much because people are insatiably curious about the details of our lives as it is that they’re looking for inspiration for chronicling their own, which I’ve tried to provide in this “How to Write a Christmas Letter” post.

Our family page was pretty popular, too. I added current photos a couple of months ago, but the children’s bios haven’t been updated for four years now. Oops! I’m determined to bring that information up do date this year, too, and will post a notice as soon as I’ve completed the project.

As always, our Kids Eat Free page saw a lot of traffic last year. We’d all like to keep food costs down while serving delicious and nutritious meals to our family, wouldn’t we? And if the meals were fast and easy, as well, so much the better!

While I have no intention of turning the Flanders Family Website into a food blog, we do plan to be more intentional about consistently gathering our family around the dinner table at home this year (too many restaurant meals can blow a budget, even if you don’t have to pay for the kids’ meals!). As we enjoy success in this endeavor, we’ll be sharing tips on what works best for us at mealtime in hopes that it will improve your family dinner hour, too.

Lastly, I’ve decided to add a couple of new weekly columns this year: Mailbag Mondays will help me deal with some of the more general questions I find flooding my inbox, and In the Word on Wednesday will help keep us focused on first things first.

I pray that 2015 will be a year of great growth and blessing for you and for us as we seek to honor God by serving those He places in our path — a habit that has to begin at home.