Blog 2.0: Presenting The Redesign

A few weeks ago, I switched from wordpress.com to wordpress.org and I began self-hosting my blog. I thought all my problems would stop there. I was wrong. I ran into two different technical issues and both locked me out of my account until A Small Orange helped me out (thank you kind customer service folks!). Once those issues got resolved, I really thought I would be done with issues on the site.

I was wrong again. I had fallen in love with the design of my original site. However, the theme had caused my new site to crash the first time so I searched for another. I had been working off a pre-set theme for a few days but it wasn’t doing quite what I wanted. I couldn’t find social media buttons, the widgets looked slightly off and it wasn’t the feel I was going for. Yes, I am a little OCD and like things to be perfect. Thankfully, my sisters are both pros at setting up websites and directed me to a wonderful paid theme.

Paying for the theme I have now was totally worth it. I love it and I think my site is finally at a place I am confident leaving it for the long run. Getting to that point only took six or seven edits and hours of playing around with my dashboard. While in the process of setting up my new page, I learned a few things. One: setting up a website is very difficult (especially when I am OCD about perfection). Two: I might never be happy with how it looks. Three: all that matters in a site design is if readers can navigate and can see everything.

That is why I love the grid option. It displays all the posts without the messiness. You don’t need to read a whole post to get to the next one. The site looks better, has a more professional sounding domain name and it is all mine. A part of my happiness is because I am proud of myself.  I managed to put together a self-hosted site. It is 100x harder than I ever anticipated but I don’t think it came out bad at all. In fact, I think mine up there with other blogger’s pages I’ve seen.

I’ve been waiting to write a formal post about the redesign because until now I didn’t feel it was finished. Now, enjoy the site, the content and the redesign.