If you haven't already noticed, my blog received a little TLC from me this week. Although re-designing your blog may seem as daunting as Extreme Makeover, there are a plethora of small things that if they are done right can help to jumpstart your blog into the right direction of progress. There wasn't necessarily something wrong with my blog before, it just didn't contain some of the personal elements that help to add a certain pizzaz, as well as elements that help smooth out the flow of efficiency.
The Process
To start out with, I decided to lay the foundation of the theme of my blog by creating a new background image in photoshop so that I could establish a color scheme and add some of my personality back into my blog. I wanted my background to be simple enough that it wasn't distracting to the important stuff (the content) but not so simple that it didn't add any value. My general color scheme throughout my time as a designer has always been light blues and other pastel colors so I decided to stick with that by starting out with a slight gradual gradient of a lighter blue color to a grey-blue color and then back to the original shade in order to make sure that the gradient flowed as it repeated itself. I then added a cartoon graphic of the Eiffel Tower because the largest portion of my nationality besides being American is French; I am also very in love with their culture and am actually taking a trip to Paris this spring break! Then I added my initials in a nice balloon font from dafont.com just to add some personal flare.
Here is an image of the final background image:
After I situated the background I decided to move on to changing the actual layout of my blog. I chose a new template, even simpler than the one I had before. I move my gadgets around accordingly and also added an HTML/Java Script gadget to provide a little blurb of information on what my blog is about as well as removing unnecessary gadgets I had such as the Daily Puppy one I used to have. I also went through all of my already existing blog posts and added labels so that my readers could find the topics they are interested in more easily. I then moved these labels, or topics, to the top of my blog as buttons so that if you wanted to read all of my posts over a certain topic you could just click on whichever they desire.
Next, I went into the advanced settings of blogger in order to adjust the widths of attributes, change text colors, change fonts so that they are more legible, and overall just add the finish touches to polish it up.
The Finished Product
Overall, I am very pleased with the changes I made to my blog. I think that it definitely increased the efficiency of my blog, especially in the area of finding the topic you are looking for, and added a lot of visual appeal. I will continue to improve my blog of little things as I find necessary such as adding social media buttons, adding my logo into my banner and experimenting with gadgets that could add to the quality of my blog.
I hope that you enjoy the makeover and if you have any feedback on more changes I can make leave a comment below!
No comments