A New Look!

You got a minute or a few?  Grab a cup a coffee (or your favorite beverage) and let me share what I’ve been up to around here.

If you’re familiar with my blog then don’t be confused.  This is still the same Tina’s Chic Corner that you know and love, but with a whole new look!  After four years (holy cow, my blog will be four years old next week), I decided to redesign my blog.  This change sort of happened by accident.  My old blog theme was a customized version of a theme called Pinboard that was created by my husband.  The problem was that it was old and outdated, and the original Pinboard is no longer maintained by the original author.  That means that every WordPress update came with potential issues.  After all, a couple of years of new WordPress stuff can really confuse a theme that was not written with those changes in mind.

The real clincher was that the theme was causing WordPress to resize my photos in slightly odd and entirely unpredictable ways.  This process made it very hard to determine what size I should make them to try to minimize how much they got messed with and that in turn meant that the overall quality of the pictures was way less than I wanted.  I have a fantastic camera and you wouldn’t know it by what you see on the blog lately.  I know I’m a tough critic, and that I was “pixel peeping” (looking at crazy zoom levels for the minute flaws in an photo) but the eyes don’t lie.  My husband (and tech support) tried multiple solutions to fix this problem.  For example, he also wrote the tool I use for watermarking my images, and thought it could be that tool that was causing the problem.  As it turns out, it was just WordPress doing its thing.  The photos never looked as crisp and clear as seen on my camera or computer as they did on the blog, and that REALLY bothered me, which in turn meant I REALLY bothered my husband about it a lot.

I’m not a fan of change but after a few months of debating (and my husband telling me he has no idea how to fix what I was seeing), I decided something needed to be done and that something only meant one real solution.  I needed to redesign my blog.

I’ve spent many, many, MANY hours on this redesign.  I second guessed every single decision that I made.  Every.  Single.  One.  I changed everything 10 times, and then 30 or more times.  Seriously, I can’t tell you how many times that I changed the font.  They all started to look the same at the end.  I annoyed my tech support (sorry, babe) and he stuck with me through it to make the various changes only the nerdier type folks could possibly change.   Then, when I finally made the decision to go live I made a few more minor changes here and there.  I think I finally have it where I like everything!

What’s the same?

1. My blog name (obviously).
2. The content.  I’m still blogging about stylish, simple and delicious ideas (though I removed that tag line from the blog).
3. The recipe and decor indexes are the same.
4. You can still leave me comments and it’s still located at the bottom of every post.
5. You can still subscribe to my blog via email, and the area to do that is even in pretty close to the same place.

What’s changed?

1. It’s a 100% redesign.  It’s more simple and clean looking, with a touch of color.
2. The page menu is still at the top of the page, but there are less of them now.
3. The home page now shows you a header picture and the first few lines from the most recent posts, instead of the whole post.  If you want to read more of a specific post then you click on the “continue reading” button.  The button is a light grey color but then turns pink when your cursor is on top of it.  Pretty cool, right?!
4. You can connect with me on the various social media outlets by clicking on the respective social media icon that you can find at both the top of the page, and all the way down at the bottom.
5. The “search” box (which I love and use all the time) is now located in the header of the front page and every post page.  It used to just be on the home page, which was frustrating to no end for me.
6. The home page now shows a cool little grid of my most popular posts of all time (love that feature).  You can find this on the right side below the ads.
7. The bottom of my home page and every post page now shows a few of my most recent tweets.
8. You can still search my blog by category or dig through the archives by when things were posted, but it is now located on the bottom of the page.
9. Each post page will show you the most recent posts at the bottom of the page.
10. And one of the most requested features is now implemented…  There is finally a “print recipe” button by the recipe that conveniently brings up only the recipe for the print job!  Wahoo!

As a heads up, some of the old posts might look a little different because they were formatted for a different theme.  For example, the pictures might be different sizes or missing entirely.  The pictures that are missing, I will definitely try to fix.  The ones that are the wrong size may just end up staying that way because there are just too many of them (there are over 550 posts!) and I’ve always sort of liked the idea that this blog is a bit of a time capsule.  In other words, I will make a new post about a recipe instead of updating the one from 3 years ago where I used a horrible camera.  The good news is that all of the recipes are still 100% there and accurate.  If you have any questions on something that you think is missing or whatever, please do not hesitate to reach out to me.

I love this fresh new look and I think it’s easy to navigate.  I’d love to know what you think.  🙂