This week I've been working diligently on some new design aspects to almost all of my social networking hubs. This blog was the first to get a makeover. For a while now I've had my sights set on Blogger's new dynamic templates, and so I decided to give it a shot.
So far, I like how the daily posts are set up so you can see the last week at a glance, and then scroll down to see older posts. That's in the Magazine view, and if you want to change how you view the blog, you can click on the drop down menu near the top left of the blog and change it to something else. I have it set at Magazine by default though. You can hover over the right side of the blog to bring out tabs that show info about me, my blog followers, the post archive, and other things. The only drawback to using the dynamic template is that I'm limited in the number of Blogger gadgets I can use, but I like this new design enough to put up with it for now. And you can still access my pages at the top of the blog to find out more about me, my books, and the genre I write in.
The next design element I'll be rolling out is a new logo - for my writing empire as a whole, and for me as an author. I know it's usually frowned upon for authors to brand themselves with a logo, but I've never been good at following the status quot. Besides, I sort of already have a logo - the white oak tree - at my main website, I'm just sprucing it up a bit and putting some more meaning behind it.
After the logo, I'll be cleaning up my main website a bit - making things easier to read, polishing up the format of the Compendium entries, and cleaning up the book pages to be more informative. That will probably take me a few days to a week. In the midst of doing that, I'll also be creating some nifty cover images for my FB pages, and finishing up October's email newsletter to go out in the next week.
2 comments:
As I said before, I really like this new layout. It's really high tech and definitely promotes sharing posts.
I do like this new design, but there are some flaws to it that Blogger needs to fix soon. For example, you can't preview your post before publishing it. When you hit the preview button, it just goes to your main blog and doesn't show you what your current post will look like. Also, they are heavily limited in what gadgets you can add to the blog, meaning I had to strip a lot of what I had on the old design out. But, now it feels a little more simple and maybe easier to navigate for some people. I'll keep giving it a try and see how it works out over the course.
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