Friday 2 May 2014

blog makeover - with detailed release notes !

In the 5 years that this blog has been in existence, i havent given it any great deal of attention beyond the basics. i have changed header images, fonts, colours here and there, and for some brief period had installed a third party theme.. that was pretty much it. but i had decided it was about time for a detailed overhaul, and this had been in the works for quite some months now. i wanted to do it in january, but couldn't then, so finally pulled together most of what i wanted now.

i spent more time on deciding what i wanted than the actual implementing part - whenever i saw blogs that i thought were looking beautiful, i looked around and noted what it was that i liked about them.

i'm not a techie and don't know a single word of code, so i always scroll down to the bottom of the pages to see what theme they are using, and i read up a lot of 'how-to' tutorials whenever i saw something but didnt know how to implement it.

i created another test blog, kept it private and made every change there to see how it would look. i spent a great deal of time deciding on colour and background patterns - it was as if i was painting a house ! - i made 'swatches' for so many colours( in google drawings), noted down hexcodes, changed them around a lot to see which combinations i liked. it was time consuming since i learnt many of the do's & dont's along the way, and you have to be either super talented with design stuff, or super-patient, to get the results you want - i can tell you that. (i'm the latter, of course.)

here's the before and after !


so, whats new in this version - :)

Blog Name - i had it named 'random rambles' for 5 years now, but decided to change it to 'simply sowpar', so that it matches the url, and is more a reflection of my real name. hopefully less confusing too :) there is no url change involved.

Theme - i had the 'picture window' theme for the past few years (and used one of my own pictures). i have now installed the 'simple' theme - it gives you a blank slate to work with and you can add so many customisations.

Header - the present header is an image made with a combination of google drawings and picmonkey - the fonts are from google webfonts and the motif design is a picmonkey overlay.

Blog Background - i made a design in picmonkey with a series of overlays alternating in two colours. (you do need a good deal of patience for this, and a word of caution- picmonkey doesnt have an option of saving- if you close it you lose it.)

Fonts - phew. if you are font crazy, it takes a lot of time to decide and settle on something :)
             Header - Blog name - Rogue script, Blog description - Satisfy.
             Tabs Text (the menu of pages below header) - PT Sans Narrow, 24px.
             Date header and sidebar headings - PT Sans Narrow, 21px.
             Post title - PT Sans Narrow, 30px
             Page text (main content of posts) - PT Sans, 15px

Colours - I took a white background, and used only two colours. the light blue that you see, is close to a 'robin's egg' blue, and is inspired from this pic which i had pinned -
(source of pin here ) 

the hex code of the robin blue i've used is #1fb7c4.  the hex code of the dark blue, close to navy, is #133165. i've used the same combination all over - in the fonts, in the header design, as well as the background design.

Social media icons - i downloaded and used the ones from this set - 28 vintage social icons from iconstoc.com . To use them, i referred to instructions from A typical english home.

About page - ha. after 5 years i finally decide to have an about page, people ! (i'm never that good or comfortable when it comes to describing myself, and for this one reason am thankful i havent had to attend too many interviews in life ! )
there are also links to two new pages in the header, one explaining a little about my pics and the other linking to all the mundane monday posts.

thats pretty much it, i hope i got all the major stuff covered. do let me know what you think, and if you like something you see, and need more info than what i've given here, feel free to ask !

keep peeping in every now and then - i'd love to see you often! (ok, as long as you dont stay for dinner.)



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