New Blog Design 2014

Hey guys! Have you noticed anything different around here?

First of all, you may have noticed on Saturday that there was a slightly different look…

 

The blog was down. Usually when I’m making small changes, I just let the blog stay up but this time it was serious.

Let’s Back Up a Minute

I’ve been wanting to make a change for awhile. As I related to my e-mail subscribers, it was like when you know you need a haircut but you put it off and put it off and then one day you’re just like OMG I NEED A HAIRCUT NOW.

Except for it was like OMG I NEED A NEW BLOG DESIGN NOW. And I decided to cut fix it myself. 

To go on a tangent..I am also thinking of getting a hair cut. It involves pink highlights..or maybe a rose gold color…

Follow Diary of a Semi-Health Nut’s board Beauty [Hair Do] on Pinterest.I’ve been pinning some ideas to my hair board on Pinterest if you’re interested!  

Theme I Used for my New Blog Design

I researched and researched and probably spent way too long previewing different themes and finally settled on Foodie Pro for a few reasons:

• I saw it everywhere. Tons of bloggers I love are using Foodie, so I decided to look into it.
• It’s mobile responsive and I liked the way it looked. My old theme was alright in the mobile department except for the header showed up way too big and the menu showed up in a ginormous list so it just didn’t look super appealing which is why I used WP Touch Pro.
• The super customizable layout, fonts and colors drew me in. I was debating on using a different theme that could be used alongside the Studio Press plugin Genesis Design Palette Pro because I HATE getting into the coding side of things. I always break stuff. I very much miss how on the Blogger Platform you could change fonts, colors, layout and widths without coding and see all the changes live. You can do a lot of that with the Genesis Design Palette Pro, but it only works with a few themes.
• The customizable recipe page. I haven’t messed with this yet because I currently have a way to display recipes but what I’m currently using isn’t mobile friendly at all PLUS I have to go to a different site to set it up. I’d rather publish a recipe and have it automatically go to it’s correct spot(s) based on the tags I use. I even think I can set up a page to organize other content which has me geeking out just a bit. #organizeallthethings
• Tutorials on how to set it all up. This was what pretty much confirmed my decision because I’ve never set up a WordPress theme myself before and I knew I was going to need help. I probably could have figured some of it out on my own, but setting up the homepage I definitely needed the tutorial because your posts don’t just show up automatically like on some themes.

 

    You can purchase Foodie Pro and a number of other awesome themes with my Studio Press affiliate link here.  

What I’m Loving About My New Blog Design

• The homepage layout. I don’t think I realized how cool it was going to be until I started following the tutorials. There are so many options! I love how I can display a couple of categories like recent recipes, fitness and life posts. I had no control over that sort of thing with my last theme.
• The fonts and colors. I was trying to figure out what I wanted my colors to be but then I remembered I really like the way my recipes are set up so I used those colors. Like literally copy-pasted the color numbers. 

 

     

Things Still on my To Do List

• Recipe page. Darn Recipage doesn’t work well on mobile devices which is a huge bummer because I loved having it to organize all of my recipes. I also don’t think the creator of Recipage is super active anymore..I mean Recipage showed up on my Twitter app as not active for the last 6 months..so…yeah. I know it’s going to take a lot of work, but I really love how Foodie Pro has a way to show all the different categories on one page.
• Layouts slash widgets. I feel like there still isn’t much of a coherent flow to the sidebar and footer. I’ve messed with it awhile, but decided it’s good enough for now. It’s also one of those things that I could spend all day playing around with arrangements. Eventually I just need to call it good and leave it be.
  • My blog is pretty slow to load and when using the Google Pagespeed Insights tool, I can see it’s mainly because of my images. I’ve had this blog for 4 years and for a good year I was using ginormous images from my dSLR camera without resizing them so basically all of my images over the last 4 years are slowing everything down. Kind of crazy, right? So one thing I can do to improve speed is go through and delete the large images and replace them with smaller ones. Any volunteers?Optimizing my blog.
  • Another thing I recently discovered and researched a bit is no follow links. Mind = blown. Basically for all the sponsored posts I’ve done I want to go back and add no follow links to hopefully improve my Google score. Fun stuff.

 

Things for a Designer to Do

• Branding. I have the colors I like which is the first step, but I also want specific fonts and a logo that I can use in my header, business cards, social media and maybe even to watermark photos.
• Little details. I am super scared to get into the coding side of the blog and there are some details I need a little help with. Nothing urgent right now, but I know over time they will bug me.

 [Tweet “Check out Diary of a Semi-Health Nut’s new look!”]

I have a bit of work ahead of me, but I’m still pretty happy with the results so far! 🙂

      Tell me….

What do you think about the design??

 

PS I’m all about Pinterest this year, so I would LOVE IT if you could pin one (or two!) of these images! Pin with me!Follow SemiHealthNut

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