Tuesday 14 April 2015

A Long-Needed Redesign

   Hey guys! Notice anything different? I really hope you do because I spent the whole day ripping my hair out over HTML.
   I just gave the blog an overhaul. Yes, I stuck with the same kind of set-up as before because I prefer the right-hand sidebar - for now, at least - but I revisited my colour scheme, fonts, header and background.

   My blog has remained unchanged for a couple of years now, and I've really grown tired of seeing the navigation buttons on the sidebar, the brown branch in my header, the pink/grey combo, the Syncopate font and so on. Finally I decided it was time for a change and actually managed to come up with something.
   The concern in the forefront of my mind lately has been that my blog has lost its identity. I blog about fitness because I love it, but I feel like the rest of me - not the crafting, but the writing, fantasy and other passions I have - has gotten lost. It's become entirely fitness-focused, and while I certainly don't intend to force those horses back into the stables, I wanted to try to bring a bit more of my passion and personality through in other ways.

   So I changed the colours to my current favourite combo, I went for an Aztec-style background which I actually drew from some of my favourite fitness capris, I combined tribal, fantasy and fitness into a new illustration for my header along with watercolour splashes, and - something you probably haven't seen yet - drew a handful of fantasy illustrations for my archive pages. They're not brilliant, not at all, I make no claim that they are, but for my personal skill I'm dead proud of them. I just wish I knew how to scan them to give them a soft pencil look; they just scanned in really sharp, and that, to be honest, is my only real complaint - skill improves with practise, but a bad scanner is a bad scanner.
   My favourite illustration is on the contact page, and my least favourite, funnily enough, is on the 'about me' page, but I can always replace it if I manage to draw something better.
   I also, with lots of trouble, made a sticky navigation bar. I combined a selection of tutorials from Xomisse's navigation tutorial archive and managed to make it. It looks like nothing, I know, really simple, but it took me 3 hours and lots of frustration.

   I'm really happy with it. I'll get tired again, in time, but I'm still happy to stick with the clean look. My last design was simple and so is this, but I love that. I can't stand cluttered blogs! Sometimes there are too many ads - never buy an ad on a blog if there are more than 10 because it all becomes visual white noise - sometimes it's too much colour or too many graphics. I think I'm pushing it with all the vines and ivy I've added as dividers, and while I only have 3 ads displayed I think they're at the limit, too. But I'm happy with it!
   My product review page has been updated, too, and now lists not only product reviews, but fitness DVD reviews too, which can still be found on the fitness page. I've also made an alternative page for requesting product reviews so that the archive is tidier and more reader-friendly, but I feel the whole blog's navigation just got so much simpler.




2 comments:

  1. The new design looks great and I love your illustrations, they are really good.
    Kat x

    Raspberry Ribbons

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you, I appreciate you saying so ^^
      Your blog is adorable, by the way, so pink!

      Delete

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