In January when I sat down to plan my year ahead I realised that I was yearning for a more simple life. Already things feel less hectic than they did a few years ago. I no longer commute into central London daily, but instead live in Cornwall where I walk my kids to school each day. I no longer have an office job, but instead (for just a couple more months) I’m studying for a Masters and am hardly ever required to be physically at university. Crucially I’m also no longer in a high stress unhappy marriage, so all in all life does feel calmer than it did.

But it still feels too complicated sometimes. Next month we’re moving and as I look around our house I can see a mammoth task to sort through and discard toys and clothes which the kids have grown out of, clothes that I’ve amassed but hardly ever wear, and a mountain of paperwork and kids’ artwork that comes from keeping stuff ‘just in case’. As the levels of clutter have risen around us over the three and a half years we’ve lived here, I’ve kept saying that I’d get on top of it ‘some day’. Without the impending move though, I’m not sure I ever would have.

So I’m expecting the new house to be less cluttered and will make a promise to myself to be better at dealing with unwanted mail and clothes and toys. But it got me thinking about my online life, and I realised that’s probably the most cluttered of all. After five or so years of blogging and running various online businesses my web hosting account was a mess. Domains I no longer needed, websites that for whatever reason have stopped functioning properly and need more technical expertise than I possess to fix them, plugins and themes renewing at different times…

Argh! I just want everything to be simple and straightforward again.

So I’m making a clean break. No more self hosting – I just don’t need the hassle. I’m not running a copywriting or consulting business anymore – I don’t need to spend hours a week tweaking my website copy and images, or writing SEO optimised blog posts that will offer value to my target market. Bollocks to the lot of it. I don’t have a target market anymore, so I can write whatever I want on my blog. As a freelance writer it’s helpful to have an online presence to showcase what I’ve done and to share my writing with the world, but I’m keeping things as simple as I can from now on.

So here we are: a basic website which tells you who I am and what I do. One where I will blog as often or rarely as I like. I’ll also pop up some links to my work for anyone who comes here looking for proof of expertise or writing talent.

And that’s it.

Nothing fancy.

No tweaking styles or colour or design.

Just me in my new clean online space.