Since starting this blog, I have done all of the designing myself. I taught myself how to use Gimp (a free "photoshop"), and how to code a website. Whatever I didn't know (which was a lot), I googled and taught myself. It's gone through a lot of changes, and there have been many more mistakes. I have broken my blog more than once, and it was in a permanent state of simply hiding the things that didn't work. Last week, I was adding one thing to my blog, and it just one more thing than my poor blog could handle and it went all kinds of wonky. Josh was going to be out of town for a couple of days, so I took the opportunity to scrap it all and build my blog from the ground up again.
Using all of the knowledge from my learning experience of website design from the last three years of injuring my blog, (and a whole lot of coffee) I started again.
...and amazingly, it worked! Let me walk you through it.
The first thing I did was write down what I wanted my blog to feel like. I came up with: homey, comfortable, southern, sweet, feminine (but not overly so). Then I went to Pinterest (when in doubt, right?) and did some searching. I created an inspiration board of pictures that I thought captured the feel I wanted. Pretty soon patterns started to emerge, and I noticed similar colors, backdrops, and elements appear.
I narrowed it down to these colors and fonts. Then I made a note of what design elements I loved about the blogs I read. Again, I noticed more themes of things I loved. Subtle patterned backgrounds, smaller/narrow header text, clear menus, big photos, plenty of white space, few colors, few fonts. From this, I sketched out what I wanted my blog to look like on paper, and got started putting it together.
As I started putting all of the elements together, I kept a separate document of every code change I made, so that I could remove it if it didn't work immediately. This means that there should be no duplicate code to make things go wonky again. It may have been a long (and somewhat painful) journey of mistakes to get here, but I am so pleased with how everything turned out! It should now be much easier to use and find what you're looking for, and if it's not, let me know!
I also revamped my pages, including the About page. The "Join Us!" page became GIVE and takes you directly to our missionary page with NTM. There's no more fluff to read through, it's just straight to the point. Everything is my own, and I feel like I finally found my own design voice.
I hope you love the new look as much as I do! Please stick around, try things out, and leave some love about what you think!
