Heyyyyyyyy good looking {site re-branding!}

posted in: blog love, news, technical things | 2

Notice anything different?

order generic Lyrica After a couple of weeks playing around with the layout in Photoshop, I finally have my new design up! As much as I liked my old design, it was feeling a little stale. I wanted something new, fresh, and crisp. Since so much of the artwork I post is colorful, I wanted something relatively simple, that didn’t compete with the art for attention. On the other hand, I still wanted something that was fun, my style, and spoke to the kind of work I do. Right now I love this design. I was a little worried that it was going to take forever to actually implement it in WordPress, but my CSS skills must have improved over the last year, because I made the changes in about 15 minutes without any kind of disasters, tears, or swearing (I feel like I deserve a gold star, or at least a cookie).

http://reborn-babies-dolls.com/anyone-ever-heard-of-a-baby-reborn-dolls/ old header design

screen shot of new site design

Here’s what’s new and exciting:

  • New header design…reminiscent of the old header, but simpler and cleaner
  • New social media links, including a link to follow me on Instagram!
  • An actual photo of me! I’m known for not liking to get my picture taken and really disliking most pictures of myself, so we’ll see how long this actually stays up for.
  • I replaced the fancy rollover buttons in the sidebar with some simple gray category buttons. I couldn’t believe I got rid of them after all the effort it took to figure them out, but after looking at them all the time they were feeling too big and clunky, and the novelty had worn off
  • New font in my sidebar widgets and new link colors (hellooooo turquoise, I love you!)
  • I got rid of the Alice in Wonderland quote on the footer, and replaced it with my Twitter feed, category links, and recent posts
  • Changed the background

screen shot of my design process

Nothing too crazy, but it feels good to give the site a little makeover. I hope you like it too!

2 Responses

  1. I like your blog. Just landed upon it as I was researching some ways to improve mine. I notice that your line separator is underneath your “You Might Also Like” and this is something I’m trying to fix. If you look at mine, the line is above! I cannot seem to fix it. Any suggestions?

    http://searchingforsesamestreet.blogspot.com/

    Your site looks really good! Thanks, Julie

    • Hi! To be 100% honest, I don’t remember how I did it. Most of the style changes on my blog were done by reading a LOT of online tutorials and playing with changes in Firebug (which is AWESOME, if you use Firefox I highly recommend it). I’d suggest searching “Link within customization”. I know that’s what I did, but I can’t remember which tutorial I used (it was over a year ago). Thanks and good luck!