Ooh – Pretty shiny

- OR – The blog gets a makeover

If you’ve been coming to the site to read the posts, you’ll notice that something has changed.

Not a lot, mind you, but I did give the site a bit of a refresh. You’ll notice the stuff at the top has changed:

I’ve updated the logo, moved the massive 3 item menu to the right of the logo, and added 2 ad boxes. One is a permanent link to the instructions on joining us on #massagechat and the other will take you to my web design business website.

If you click on a post title, the post page will have a floating social sharing menu on the left. Just click Like or + or Tweet and the plugin will take care of the rest.

You’ll also see that I’ve updated my social profile links and added my Google+ profile. This, too, is done with a plugin. No more uploading icons and writing html in widgets. (I realize that sounded a lot like Romulan to most of you, sorry for the geek speak).

Archives

The list was getting really long, which shows I’ve been at this a while, so I’ve changed it to a drop down menu to save some space.

Categories

This is a word cloud because it was fun. And it saves space.

Blogroll

They are all still there. If you’re not on this list, use the contact form on the Contact page and shoot me your URL.

I kept most of the formatting really similar. I may have missed a thing or two here and there, so there might be a bit of tidying up to do.

Why the refresh?

The blog was getting close to 2 years old. I wanted to be able to ad the advert blocks on the top. But mostly, my theme of choice, Headway, just came out with a huge new update and I wanted to show the users there that they can do a refresh with an old version running live and the new version running behind a magic curtain.

Easy Peasy

This was so simple with Headway. I used a plugin to allow me to redesign the site on a new theme while you only saw maybe 1 or 2 tiny changes on the live site. The entire site redesign, including a couple of new photoshop files, was done over a weekend. The change over took less than 2 minutes.

I hope you like the updates. Let me know what you think in the comments below.

4 Responses to Ooh – Pretty shiny

  1. BethanyBob says:

    Howdy! I am on my netbook with a 1024 x 600 screen resolution, running Windows XP and Google Chrome. The one thing that was immediately obvious is the collapsible Share icon with links to Twitter, Facebook, and G+ to my left: it’s sticking out too far and covers some of your text on my screen. It makes it difficult to read, especially where it follows me wherever I scroll.