Wrapping up the last few posts of the year & I can’t neglect some of the biggest news for the blog for the year as I decided I wanted a more permanent, more robust, more organized, more user friendly website that will grow with me into the future. The great migration from Blogger to WordPress is almost complete as my blog has had a make-over. Waaay back in the early days (July 2007- February 2008), I had a generic blogger homepage in my happy color of pink. I wish I had known that all those photos I was uploading through blogger to Google albums were only 400-500 pixels. One of my “MUST” items for the new blog was super-big photos & a very aggressive backup system for my 1000+ posts and photos.
I got ever so slightly snazzy-ier in in February of 2009 when I customized the header & background- also expanding my photos to 750 pixels. I had started adding a few special pages, like the wine bars & blogging Vizslas on my sidebar at that time. By now though, I had quite a few buttons for dedicated links to my trip summaries & a few other fun things I’d started consistently writing about on the blog.
In August of 2010, I made the move from Blogger to WordPress. I focused on getting the mechanics working & all the elements in place, plus learning a whole new blogging dashboard. I just started out with a generic background, no theme & no fancy header. In addition to being behind in general from all of my New Zealand posts & house works, I tried to keep my head above water on the blog by just plowing forward and posting a snippet of life everyday.
I looked around for blog designers (there are TONS of them) & had a really horrible experience with one of them (still disputing that with American Express….). I finally began working with Designer Blogs & they were so wonderful to work with throughout the entire design process. I picked some colors, gave her some info, & Amy worked her magic to come up with a beautiful header, great design elements for the background & sidebars. I assume that most people read my blog through a feed reader, so you probably only visit the website to comment (I love comments!). I mostly invested in my blog for myself- to make things more organized and easier for me to find in the future.
From the custom fonts to the 900 pixel main area for giant photos, I think I have just about everything in place. I have several buttons that I made on the sidebar for all of our major travels & for the fun stuff on the blog. WordPress offers so much functionality & wonderful drop-down menus that make me happy. I still want to do some updating on these pages as I continue to add content to them & need to spruce up pages like the Photography page.
I’ve also installed plug-ins for organization that make my heart smile. Great drop-down menus at the top, pages for all posts by date, page for a listing of all posts alphabetically, a page listing all posts for each category. I’ve made some pages for info about me, the pups, hubby, photography & running. I’m still need to clean those up & add some freshness to them, but I’m happy they are at least there for now. I’ve still got a few more things I am tweaking behind the scenes, but I’m so excited to be done with the main over-haul on the blog. Hope you enjoy it!
GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY:Apparently Hubby is ALSO getting to go to the Super Bowl in addition to the Pro Bowl-yup, I’m more than a little jealous!
[...] with purple and gray/green recently, so I’m thrilled with how it turned out. I’d had my latest design for about a year & a half, but when I’d switched over to WordPress. My big issue was [...]