New Blog Design // Blog Makeover with Kathastrophal

Hooray, today is such an exciting day for me! After my blog makeover back in 2014 and my last major blog makeover style changes in 2016, it was now time for a really big new step. My friend Katha (Kathastrophal.de) is not only a blogger, but also a web developer and after I had heard about her doing a blog makeover for Lisa (Mein Feenstaub), I became curious and asked for details. One thing which had been on my to do list for my blog for quite a while was getting a responsive design and a new and more functional layout and it was sure that I would definitely need help for this.

I founded my blog back in 2010 and since then, I had been blogging on Blogspot. I changed my blog design and the code over the years, but everything was DIY with the help of Google and friends. By now, it was really time for someone professional to put hands onto my code. Katha offered to do this and to move the whole blog to WordPress for better usability and better modification options and one of my main wishes was to get automatic post archives. We talked about the details and have been working on everything over the past few weeks. Wuoah!

So getting started, Katha moved all my over 850 blogposts (!!! 🙂 ) to WordPress behind the scenes, implemented a new theme, edited the CSS, made suggestions for useful plugins and worked on all my wishes. In the meantime, I edited old posts, sorted them into the archives and edited thumbnails for blogposts.

The Web Developer Behind the Makeover

So as you just read, this is Katha who made my new design and wayyyy more functional and practical blog possible. We met each other about six years ago through our blogs and then became friends. Doing this makeover with a professional web developer who I am also friends with was double fun. Thank you again so so so much for fulfilling all my wishes and for being quick and patient! Check out her blog about fashion, lifestyle and DIY or write her in case you need help with your own blog or website.

I hope you’ve become curious now. Here’s what we changed:

Luloveshandmade Blog Makeover with Kathastrophal

As you can see, me and my blog have quite a long journey behind us. It’s been more than seven years, more than 850 blogposts and more than 2 million page impressions. Puh! When I started writing Luloveshandmade back in those days, it all developed super slowly, I learned more each day in tiny steps and would have never ever thought that one day, my blog would be such a huge part of my life and also significantly contribute to my income and most of all, would make me so so happy.

So after all those years, it was time to optimize the blog and its usability. I didn’t plan to drastically change fonts or graphics (since I had just done this last year and still love everything), but I wanted to make everything more functional and responsive. Here’s the old version before the makeover:

There were two navigation bars on top, but everything made with graphics instead of with HTML and CSS. No slider, no responsive design.

A few years ago, I manually set up all my archives. What a heavy workload! I manually edited all photos for all the archives and implemented them into the code. When uploading a new image, I always needed to do this manually.

For me, this way it worked best, but it was time for a less time-consuming alternative.

The footer looked simple with just the Instagram widget and a few banners.

For the footer, I wanted a new solution. I’ll show you soon what’s new.

Changes: This is new

Hooray, time to show you all the changes! Over the past weeks, I had been so excited and could hardly wait until we were done! 🙂

So here’s what has changed. The homepage is still clean and bright, the menu bars have a new style and are even cleaner than before. Below the second bar, there is finally a slider with the latest blogposts, updated automatically. Wohooo!

I really really love how this looks now!

The archives now work automatically, what a huuuuuge relief.

The featured image (the thumbnail) and the text (it’s always the blogpost’s title) are grabbed automatically which finally saves me so much time.

The footer now contains my favorite posts which can easily be changed. The Instagram widget is bigger than before and looks completely like I want it to.

Hooray! I am so so so happy with the result!

What a great day!

Thank you so so much, dear Katha, for making all my wishes possible!

And thank you so much, my dear readers, for following along over all the years and for making me happy!

Lu

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