Some New Blog Designs

You may have noticed that my blog has had a few design tweaks recently? It will come as no surprise to you that I love lovely, pretty things. This also applies to the design of my blog. Last year the fabulous Ellie Illustrates did my blog design for me and I love it! I also get some lovely comments from other bloggers too, so I am really pleased with how it looks.

If I’m honest I am a tweaker. Now I know in general, lots of pretty illustrations probably don’t add to the general success of your blog. But I like pretty things and the blog is a pleasure for me too, so I like for it to look nice.

This year I wanted to add a couple of tweaks and I asked Ellie Illustrates to do some additional designs for me.

Category Banners

Towards end the of last year I had some social media buttons designed and I felt they really enhanced the look and feel. So, the first items I had designed were some category banners to go on my sidebar.

The first part of the process for this was working going through all of the categories on my blog and refining them. I renamed a few and decided which were the main ones that I write about and wanted to feature. There are some that I have kept for SEO purposes that are not highlighted on my sidebar, but these are the main ones that I feel reflect my blog.

When I had my header designed I had quite a strong vision of what I wanted that to look like, but with the category banners I simply sent the names over to Ellie Illustrates and let her do her magic – I was not disappointed!

Ben’s Zone

I have a weekly column on my blog – Ben’s Zone – which is written by my husband. I had designed a badge for this myself, but I didn’t feel it was quite right design wise – and I really do love good design. The main things he writes about and the slogan of his column is ‘Food, fitness, fatherhood and Ridgebacks’, he is also a big obstacle race runner and I simply love the button design as I think it really captures the essence of it.

Laura’s Library

My last item was just a tiny tweak and was a suggestion for a couple of fellow bloggers I am in a Facebook group with. I have an area of the blog dedicated to bookishness and book reviews and I used to call it ‘Laura’s Book Corner’ and then someone suggested ‘Laura’s Library’. Now I love a bit of alliteration as you can probably tell from some of my category names, and I thought this had a much better ring to it.

These are my design tweaks, I love them. What do you think?