I’ve been told that I have “a green thumb”.  What that meant when I was a kid:  The person knows how to care for and nurture living plants so that they remain living plants.  I maintain one house plant today and I treat it (him? her?) well and this living wonder has been kept alive for ten or more years now.

I got involved in gardening when I moved here to the Washington, DC market in 1995.  And I’m not referring to caring for living plants and using soil and fertilizer and all that.  The gardening that I’m referring to here is the kind that happens online and is really all about keeping a website fresh and friendly for the visitors.

If you Google the word gardening, you mostly get the kind that refers to living plants.  Even if you use the keywords online gardening, you still mainly end up with sites that present gardening (of living plants) online.  Calling those online gardening is kind of false advertising I think.

What I got into in the 1990s was never called gardening.  It was then called editorial management, which sounds an awful lot more important than gardening, doesn’t it?  And, I’ve never had to explain to anyone that editorial management has nothing to do with caring for living plants!  Although, I think it would be honest to admit that sometimes editorial management does have some connection to fertilizer.

So, as the years went on and old words got new definitions—suddenly bomb was a good thing and bad was not bad anymore—this thing I do with websites became known as gardening.  I’ve seen the founder of Wikipedia credited with coming up with the use of gardener to describe the job function of keeping a site (usually a wiki) all nice and neat.  I wish he had come up with something else instead.  I can only imagine how many times the was asked about what has this got to do with plants.

I guess you could say that I’m qualified--both as someone who actually cares for nurtures living plants, and, as someone who has done gardening online for websites for many years now--to post some commentary about gardening of websites.  Okay, here we go.

Gardening of websites is important to do.  If you know how to exercise moderation.  Just as one can give too much water to a living plant and end up killing it, one can overgarden a website.  Did I just coin a new Web 2.0 term here?  Well, then, let’s add undergarden just so overgarden has a friend and won’t be lonely.

The point is:  Gardening of website should be a loving thing and not something that causes one heartburn or rash.  Gardening of websites should result in things getting better on the website in question.  Gardening of websites should help the website grow.

Boy, as much as I try to get away from the allusions to plants here in this commentary, the more I keep getting pulled back in.  I think Al Pacino said that originally.

Take a look at five best practices for gardening that I have prepared for your consideration based on my professional experience.  If you want to learn more about gardening, feel free to email me and ask me questions.  I will actually reply to your email and won’t try to sell you anything.