Posted on 19 Comments

Spiffying up

Yesterday around Noon on Twitter, I said this:

And then, despite knowing that these things are never 10-minute affairs, I went ahead and started playing with colors. That led to changing the header, and changing the background, and teaching myself some nifty Photoshop tricks I’ve been wanting to learn (making custom shapes from text, using custom shapes as vector masks), re-working the sharing buttons, and basically all manner of tweaking that only paused briefly for meals and a 20-minute cleanup of the papers living under my desk. It was after 9pm when I finally closed the laptop lid.


Blog design before, at Polka Dot Cottage New Blog Design, at Polka Dot Cottage

Some days, I do so love indulging my inner nerd!

If you’re reading this in email or in a reader, you should drop by and see the fresh new look. I’d love to know what you think, and if anything is hard to read, I would also love to know that. It all looks good on my screen, but I don’t have a lot of different ways to test it. Maybe you’ll see something I don’t.

Also, if you’re even interested in learning some of those Photoshop tricks I mentioned, just say the word. I think it would be fun to write up a little tutorial on how I made my background and/or header images.

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Posted on 19 Comments

19 thoughts on “Spiffying up

  1. Clean and fresh look, I love it! I simply adore your header photo!! :))

    1. Thanks! After I took the picture last night, I just stayed outside with my feet in the water, drinking my ice water, and finishing up the redesign on my laptop 🙂 Such nice evening weather we’ve been having in New Jersey lately!

      1. You are so lucky! 🙂 I have to work in an office with air conditioning that is so cold I have to ware socks in the middle of summer! Duh! 😉

        1. I remember those days, back when I had an office job. THey kept it so cold, it was impossible to know how to dress!

          1. Yes! You understand me!! :))

  2. Looks great…. love the strawberries, Lisa. And sometimes the best time to make “unnecessary changes” is precisely when you have much more important things to do. Duh, it’s called prioritizing LOL.

    1. I think I excel at that kind of prioritizing 🙂

  3. Just beautiful! 🙂

    1. Thank you!

  4. Love the colors, very fresh and summery, like a cottage by the beach.

    1. Ooh, that’s just what I was going for – a beach cottage feel. If I had an ocean handy, I’d have posed for my header picture there instead of my back yard 🙂

  5. Nice and fresh new look! I adore your photos! And your sense on colours 🙂

    1. Thank you! Color is one of my favorite things 🙂

  6. Since you’re working on a redesign anyway, there’s something I’ve been meaning to comment on.

    The header image seems very confused. When the HTML first loads (before the header image is downloaded) it takes up a page and a half in my browser (Firefox 22). The only thing I see is a big blank screen. Once the header image loads it pops down to the correct size and I can see both it and the content. It would probably be better if the space that the header fills was the same size as it will be when it’s loaded. I took a quick look through the source code and didn’t see anything obvious to fix though.

    HTH

    1. I think I know exactly what is causing that, although it doesn’t do it in Chrome.
      When I started changing around my site design to be more responsive, I removed the height attribute from the CSS for the header image. I’m guessing that Firefox, not knowing the height of the image before it loads, assumes that it will be the same as the width, and sets aside that much space for it. Next time I’m in Dreamweaver, I’ll fix that.

      Thanks for telling me. I’d have never noticed it myself.

  7. I love the new look!

    1. Thanks, Kara 🙂

  8. Looks light and clean – I’m a fan!

    1. Thanks! I hope you are settling in nicely to your new place?

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