Woohoo! I am so excited! As I have mentioned over the last few weeks, I have been working on a site design refresh. And it is dropping in on Friday night, August 31st. So depending on when you see this post, it may already be here! Hurray! [ETA: The site is up! We are still putting in some finishing touches, including uploading the new badges and signatures, so expect some slight changes over the next few days]

Ok, so to back up… As we approach our 7 year anniversary (!!!!), I thought it was a good time to freshen up the site. The original graphics were feeling dated and I wanted something crisper, cleaner, and more modern. I also wanted graphics created just for me, rather than ones I was only licensed to use. There are also some technical things that were getting outdated about my WordPress theme, so it seemed like it was a good idea to make all the changes at once. And you guys, I couldn’t be more thrilled with how it all turned out!

First off, huge love to the fabulous Courtney from Judith Shakes Designs. This girl has mad design skills. In one of those crazy twists of fate that never really work out in real life, I found her just doing a google search and totally loved her vibe. Courtney got me immediately and totally took my vision for the site and ran with it (and improved upon it). Plus, she is a romance reader! It’s fate!

So what did we do here? Well, first off I wanted a new header, so Courtney gave me a new bird/book logo and a great header to go with it. She took the basics of the original artwork and classed it up. I just adore the little bird reading a romance novel! Seriously, it couldn’t be any cuter. So we have a fresh new logo and a new header image to go with it. We also dropped the pink, added some other shades of green and red, and got new fonts for the header and logo. Courtney also gave me new badges for the posts, new signature images, and some other new spot graphics, like some cute little dotted lines. Oh, and we got rid of the zig zag background so things are nice and bright!

The site layout is basically the same, just with some enhancements. The biggest change (and something I have been dying for) is that the Search feature is now at the top in the red Menu bar, rather than buried in the side bar. The second big change is that the site now has a scalable display. That means it will go a lot wider than it used to if you have a big monitor. And even better — it will scale down as small as your phone. So no more mobile site! Regardless of the size of your screen, you will get the same, full featured site. There are also some smaller changes, like we changed the menus so there are fewer clicks needed to drill down, and we added some additional menus at the bottom below the footer. The side bar is basically the same, and the ads will be in the same place as before. And the URL, blog name, all that jazz is the same as it has always been.

So like I said, the new design is dropping on Friday night. Please be patient as there may be some adjustment pains as we get all the details fine tuned and all the new menus working correctly. But we should be good to go by the time Reading Challenge Month kicks off on Sunday!

jay signature

FILED UNDER: News and Notes
TAGGED: