New Look for a New Year New Look for a New Year

I have been unhappy with the whole layout and direction of my blog for awhile, so I’ve been working hard to give the whole thing a makeover. I’m so happy with how it turned out, I just couldn’t wait to share it. I really am going to miss my old header, but I am so stoked in the simplicity of this new layout. It looks so much more polished and I think it’s going to be easier to navigate.

Along with the face lift, I have a lot of ideas for new things to post about in 2014 and how I want to handle my blog, what I talk about on here (hint: The “thoughts” category is rather sparse at the moment, but it’s there for a reason) how I handle affiliates, etcetera. But for now, I just wanted to share the new look. There are a few things I’m particularly proud of and just need to take a moment to point out to you:

• I cleaned up all of my categories and tags. Everything is super organized now, no more random ass tagging for this gal.
• I have some long term ideas about what I want to do with Hogswallow, but that whole project is on the back burner for now. However! I put a little mini store right up on the website here with the earrings I currently have made.
• Look at how clean and simple my sidebar is. Look at it! I had already simplified and organized my sidebars on the old layout as a last ditch effort to not hate looking at my website (which, incidentally, lead my bounce rate to drop from, I kid you not, around 70% to less than 1%, for all of you coughWRENcough analytic nerds out there) but I am in love with how little is going on in this new one.
• Mobile! Thanks to WPTouch, I got both this and 100babysweaterpatterns.com looking slick and easy to navigate on a phone. Something I’d been procrastinating on like crazy.
• Dogstagraaaaam. If you don’t know already, I started a separate Instagram account for my dogs. I’m going to probably still post about them on here occasionally, but I’d like to keep most of my crazy-dog-ladyness isolated to that platform. I still have my regular Instagram, too, which you can follow on the little button below my profile picture. But I have the Frankalliope feed right there nice and big on the sidebar, why? Because my dogs is cute as hell and I like having them there.
• Photo captions. My proudest CSS moment ever: figuring out how to not hate wordpress photo captions.

Tell me what you think about the makeover in the comments below, and also, if you notice that any pages or links are broken, give me a heads up about it, yeah? I’ve been trying to make sure everything transferred with no issues (I realized this morning after I posted about it on facebook that all of my images were broken because as much as I thought I had updated all of my urls, most of them still had my local host subdirectory. UGH!) but there is always the chance that I missed something. Have a lovely weekend