I Figured Out How to Design A Blog

Sadly, my husband is tired of hearing about my NEW! BLOG! DESIGN! after asking him twenty million times for his opinion on my new blog badge that had only slight variations (is the feather better on the right or the left??).  But that’s the beauty of the Internet.  Chances are NO ONE cares about the tiny details of my redesign, but the fact that this post is public and I can write whatever the crap I want gives me the beautiful illusion that someone does care and will read this entire rambling thing.

I’m so proud of my new blog design because I did it all by myself! Meaning I customized the CSS for my existing theme and made a new banner and badge.  But still!! I was very proud of all the little tiny things I changed.

Let’s start from the beginning.  I’ve been wanting to redesign my blog for a while now.  Not because it was ugly, but, as the owner, I look at this thing all the time.  It’s like furniture – its not like the couches are in a terrible place but after looking at the couch in the same place for 5 years you just want it somewhere else you know? I was just tired of the dark look.  I wanted something colorful, feminine, and light.

Since I started my blog in 2011 I have always had a black colored theme.  White, minimalist designs seem to be the trend now and I wanted one.  But I was broke.  Enter me finding these adorable feathers on Etsy when I visited the Bumbles and Fairy-Tales blog and saw her cute new design and lo there was a design credit!!  The feather had all the colors and ooooh it could be like writing my blog title and then I added this cute font I found from Nose Graze and there you go.  From there I went color happy (pink! mint green! dark green! light brown! gold!) and changed the color of all the things I could find.

The block quote were trickier to do the colors for.  I didn’t want the Related Posts and the About the Author box the same color.  I wanted the book synopsis pink so that left light green, dark green and yellow for the back ground of each.  Yellow was too dark and having the author box light green didn’t make it different enough … then I was hit with the idea to make the author box with a yellow border and white background. An added bonus for that was that it made it look more a part of the blog post!

 

 

AND I got to learn new things! I learned how to make my own buttons so the ones on my blog could be pink instead of orange.

Here’s the thing about changing your design.  It starts out as a new header and then you realize the links don’t match and before you know it you’ve redesigned the whole thing in two days.  I even had to put a new arrow next to the return to the top link.

It took me two hours to find a cute font that you can actually read for the blog post headers that I thought matched the new style of my blog.  I loved the font in my sidebar headers but it was just too hard to read so I couldn’t use it for the post titles.  But I couldn’t let it go either. So I have like 4 fonts on my blog. Oh well :)

Then I had to make new star ratings and a new badge.  My plugin for the social media icons didn’t have the right color pink, but to my surprise I liked the dark grey.

My new banner didn’t have my owl which has been on my blog since it started.  I feel like he’s my mascot so I made a quote with him in it.  It’s from Daughter of Smoke and Bone and I thought it fit with my blog title perfectly :)

The thing that took the most time was the menu.  I had to change the font size, figure out how to change the sub menu indicator to the cute little double arrow and then figure out how to change the background color from black to it’s now present light gray.

If you are speechless at my ability to ramble for 800 words about a new blog design, I have a new catch phrase for you.

 

 

How often do you redesign your blog? Have you ever just wanted to change one thing and then ended up doing way more than that?