Tag: redesign

A New Look for the Blog

The watercolor flowers in the header have given way to etched clouds and flowering branches. The glittery script is gone, replaced by a storybook title. I had designed the previous blog theme in 2012 (!) and it was a perfect representation of where I was at in the old house, but the direction I’ve been heading in with this house is a bit different and the site needed to reflect that.

The redesign is everything I’m into these days. It’s the wallpaper patterns I love (“lush, mysterious, and just a bit sinister”). It’s a reference to motherhood by way of a few of my favorite illustrated children’s books — the wonderment of Alice in Wonderland, the sincerity of Charlotte’s Web, and the absurdity of Where the Sidewalk Ends. It’s anthropomorphic animals in fancy dress. It’s the house’s Victorian modern, and of course it is pink.

I’m terrified of birds, so naturally I had to include the swan in the header when I came across her. The illustration is from a book that predates my 1891 Victorian by more than twenty years, Les Métamorphoses du Jour by J. J. Grandville. It’s rather pretty and feminine, but at the same time, absolutely frightening. I’ve collaged her in front of an etching several decades older of clouds and flowering branches that I’ve tinted pink. We’ll see how long she stays since she has nothing to do with anything else, but you do have to admit that she is doing her best to make it lovely! I am that swan. We are all the swan. Deep.

There are other illustrations I’ve altered and added throughout that I love to pieces. Oh, and the site is responsive and mobile-friendly with wider images, improved navigation, and a better focus on content too. (I say that like it’s no big deal, but it’s a big deal.)

I began creating the new design on the Genesis framework, but it’s just not for me. I don’t want to relearn WordPress with hooks — let me dive into the code directly and muck about with the PHP and CSS. I found Solo Pine’s themes to be a great foundation to build upon, and what you’re seeing is a customized version of Oleander. The serif font is Lora and the sans-serif is Source Sans Pro.

There are several features that I may experiment with — a featured posts slider, promo boxes, and additional space in the footer. I’ll also be tinkering with any issues that come up during the switch. My old theme had been altered a great deal as I made changes and additions over the years, and I’ll want to reincorporate any of the old div classes I may have missed. Please do let me know if you encounter any errors so I can be sure the blog is working well for everyone across various operating systems.

This new redesign has been a long time due, and a long time in the making. I hope you like it as much as I do! Thank you so much to all of you for reading, and I’d love to hear what you think.

February 15, 2016
The New Site Design

I’ve finally finished the redesign of Making it Lovely!

Well, that’s not entirely true. There are a million and one little tweaks and additions that I’d still like to make, but the changes are ones that don’t impact the overall look and function, so I can add them in over the next few days/weeks.

I do all of my own designing and coding (I used to offer web design as Smart & Lovely), and this time around I built these themes off of Standard Theme for WordPress. It’s been been great to work with. I made a lot of changes visually, and a few changes to the core PHP files, but for the most part it gave me the structure I needed. And as for the pretty? I have Moglea to thank for the custom floral illustrations in the header, and I used a couple of elements from Pugly Pixel as well (the glitter and the honeycomb). The background floral pattern is a licensed image, and the logo and all the rest were done by yours truly.

Hold up, did I say themes in that previous paragraph? Plural? Yep. Remember the whole minimal vs. maximal debate I’d been having in regard to the new design? Jessica left a comment suggesting both with a theme switcher, and that was a genius idea. I’d forgotten that was even a possibility! So the default is the “Lovely” theme, full of pattern, but if it’s a bit much (and it may be), you could choose the “Minimal” theme instead. You can switch between the two themes at the top right, next to the social media links. Everyone wins! *

* Well, everyone will win. Eventually. It’s a bit buggy right now (I’m working on it), but you should be able to switch between the two themes with a hard refresh.

So what’s still to come? More organization of categories on the backend, making the design responsive (resizing to fit smaller screens for the 7% of you that need to scroll left to right a little on the site as it is now), more post layouts for different types of content, fine tuning the sidebar, perhaps adding to the footer, some changes to the social sharing options, and on and on. Good stuff, but not essential to launching. And I’ve been dying to launch, so it feels good to push on ahead, right on schedule.

And now, onward! Onward with bigger pictures, interesting new layouts, and different post formats. Onward with a select few new contributors (soon)! Onward with more content, and more awesomeness. And thank you for your patience as I’ve devoted myself to all of this design work lately. Hopefully you’ll love the new look and everything to come as much as I do.

February 1, 2012
Minimal vs. Maximal*

I’m still working away at the redesign, and I will be launching it February 1 as scheduled. I’m waffling between a clean, white minimal (well, minimal by my standards) look vs. my usual mix of patterns. Below is a little peek.

Any preferences?

* I’ve decided that’s a word, by the way. The opposite of minimal shall henceforth be maximal (e.g. my usual approach to mixing patterns).

January 30, 2012
A Sneak Peek at the Site Redesign!

I’m really excited about the upcoming redesign of Making it Lovely! I thought I’d give you a little sneak peek today (because it’s killing me to not just switch everything over immediately!). This is what last Friday’s Honor Roll post looked like and will look like:

Not every post will have that dark background, but one of the things I’m working on is giving different types of posts different layouts. I was inspired by print magazines and their regular column formats. Many posts will still have the standard white background, but the Honor Roll will get the charcoal gray you see above, other posts will get the palest of pinks, others still will get other colors, and maybe even some patterns thrown in for good measure.

I haven’t fully redesigned the site since 2009. I used to do it every year, or even more often than that! This feels really good.

January 5, 2012
Introducing a New Section on Making it Lovely: The Filing Cabinet

I am so jazzed. I have a whole new section to introduce to you today! I’m calling it The Filing Cabinet, because that’s where I’ll be filing away all kinds of extra goodies for you.

I have been working away, tweaking the design and making sure all of the technical details were taken care of. PHP and I have become good friends this week and I am happier than ever with all of the customization made possible by running WordPress. You may have noticed that the sidebar has changed. Check out the new features:

And when you’re actually in The Filing Cabinet the sidebar will show you images from the latest three posts on the main section of Making it Lovely. It’s all very fancy.

Here’s what the new section actually looks like. (And if it doesn’t look like this for you, let me know so that I can ~~crawl into a corner and weep~~ fix it. I’ve just finished coding this mere hours ago, so there may be a few bugs.)

I mean, really. The filing cabinet opens and everything. Is that not the neatest feature? Am I a little too dorky to be as excited as I am about it? (Probably.)

So what can you expect to find amongst the files? A little bit of everything and anything that catches my fancy. Furniture. Lighting. Fonts that set my hear aflutter. And you can quickly see what’s in each file at a glance. Here’s a peek at the ‘S’ for Shoes file.

Head on over and check it out. There are already about ten pages of goodies to look through, and I’ll be adding more all the time. The new posts can only be seen in The Filing Cabinet, and you can subscribe separately to that feed to have new entries delivered right to your feed reader or inbox. Yay!

November 17, 2010
Making it Lovely Turns Two

Today the blog is two years old!

To celebrate, I’ve freshened up the design a bit. Yes that’s right, I celebrated by creating work for myself. ;) Nothing drastic, but I’ve cleaned up the layout a bit, changed the proportions, and quieted the color scheme. This is the fifth design I’ve done for Making it Lovely.

I still have some refining to do and a few bells and whistles to add, but the new look is nearly done. Let me know if you notice anything odd (I’ve been working on this very late at night while very sleepy). Oh, and I’ve added support for twitter avatars as well as gravatars, so if you have one or the other your picture should show up when you comment.

Thank you all for reading and commenting, for your friendship and support, and just for all around making my day!

January 9, 2009