Making it Lovely

Tag: websites

  • The New Site Design

    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.

  • A Sneak Peek at the Site Redesign!

    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.

  • Adding Related Posts

    Adding Related Posts

    I’ve noticed a lot of people using LinkWithin to display related posts at the end of each entry. It looks great, but I had a few concerns about using it on Making it Lovely. The stats would get thrown off a bit when using the widget because all of the referring links are shown as coming from LinkWithin. I also wanted something self-hosted for more control (*ahem*), and something that could be cached to avoid slowing down the site.

    I decided to go with Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

    Hooray, it’s self-hosted! And it doesn’t throw off my referring stats! And it caches and works well in conjunction with WP Super Cache! And it’s totally customizable! It even adds related posts to your RSS feed if you so choose. Nice.

    The default display is simply an ordered list. That’s fine for the RSS feed, but I wanted a layout with thumbnail images similar to the standard LinkWithin widget. So then I started playing around with it to make it look nice…

    I quickly realized that I’d have to enable the thumbnail feature that was introduced in WordPress 2.9x. And then go through each of my posts and set the thumbnail, which I had been doing manually. OK. It’s a lot of work, but I can do that. I’m thorough (and compulsive) enough.

    Then I began working on a custom template, delving into the PHP.

    I got the thumbnails to show up! Hmm, but they were lined up vertically. So then I had to create a table-style layout, using CSS.

    The automatic placement stuck the related posts right at the end of each single post’s content, but I wanted to move it down a little. Fortunately, this was fairly easy. I just turned off the automatic placement and inserted a line of PHP into my single.php template of my theme.

    OK, pretty good. But now let’s cut to approximately three months later when it is still bothering me that the text underneath each thumbnail does not play nicely with the layout when it’s too lengthy. #$@&!. Of course it’s been so long that I don’t remember all of the work I had already done up until this point, so I have to refamiliarize myself with the CSS syntax that I set up.

    But I finally finished!

    And you know what? Maybe you would have noticed or maybe not. Maybe I spent hours upon hours, spread out over months working on something that would only make me happy, but I’m fine with that. I’m glad that I was able to really tweak the whole thing to get it exactly to my liking, even if it did take forever. I love a good coding challenge.