I'd like to take you on a tour...

Hey

So the unobservant of you (or those in a reader) may not have noticed, but the blog has undergone some pretty big changes!

I have been dreaming, planning and scheming this for some time. I kept it a bit of a secret though because I wanted you to get the benefit of the end result, not the mess in-between. (oh and there was a LOT of mess!)

Over the years I have been blogging, I have grown more attached to blog design as well as writing post. I think it really is one of my favourite things to play around with. Every now and again the blog gets a bit of a tinker or a tweak. Every once in a while it needs a whole new look.

Each time I redesign I get more adventurous. I have to say though that there were points in this process when I was frazzled. When I was trying to dissect and write pieces of coding which little clue of what I was doing and it was all going horribly wrong! But I had to remember that the blog was only going to be as good as I could make it. If I played safe, I wouldn't be happy. In all the things that went wrong, several turned out right. Some things turned out really well.

My big tip if you are thinking of redesigning a blog yourself is to try everything out on a trial blog. I could tweak and change it as much as I liked and it didn't matter if things got messy or just disappeared into cyberspace! (which they did frequently). Only when I was totally happy did I move my changes over to C.P.D.

My other tip is, don't rush the process. I tried countless changes on my trial blog over the course of several weeks. That said though, I made all the changes to this blog in one day. I sat down and blitzed it!

So after all that waffle, who is up for a tour?

First up, the blog has been given a good dose of Abi! My own handwriting is in the header and at the end of the posts. The background is also my own work-painted and scanned in.

I LOVE a clean design therefore all the useful elements have been moved to the top and all the clutter has gone! The pages and contact details are all in easy reach under the header then we are straight on with the posts. No messing around!


Extra things like archives and followers are right at the bottom of the page. They needed to be on the blog but they aren't the prettiest, so the bottom of the page works well for me!

One of my main aims was to create a user friendly interface. Therefore, simple contact buttons and page tabs. The tutorials page has also been spruced up and arranged into topics for easy browsing.

Finally, big pictures, clean text. I never wanted to lose sight of what the blog is really about!

Feel free to have a play around, what works and what doesn't? I would love to know!

So there we have it! What do you think?!