09 10

09 July 2009

New Look

I've been playing with my blog, and I've got a new look! It's a fun process, but one that takes a good deal of time. I'm not finished yet, but the overall idea is in place, I think. It's a fun process, at least partly because I get to learn lots of new things, not just about the programming, but also about Photoshop. This is the first time I've been able to make my own graphics! Here are some of the tools that I've used so far in my redecorating:

Blogger Buster's 3 Column Layout

Once I had the new sidebar, it became clear that I badly needed to add some margins and padding, which Blogger Buster also had a tutorial for.

I'm trying Link Within, though I'm not convinced that I love it. What do you think?

Blogger Buster also helped me remove the "nofollow" tags from my template, allowing the big search engines to follow the links to my friends.

I didn't end up using this Photoshop tutorial for overlapping text, but it looks good, and I'd like to in the future.

The new header is from a photo that I took and used this halftone border tutorial on it.

Anyway, it's not finished, but I'm happy with it so far.

7 comments:

misskate said...

OOOooooooh.. Fancy fancy!
Lookin' good :)

Jeannetta said...

I love the new look! It's not fully loading for me this morning, but I suspect that's my computer..not sure I like Windows Vista.
I'm changing mine too, but I am super chicken to mess things up, so I use "Cutest Blog on the Block" or one of the others with a template. :D I just have to find one I love.
I want to look at all your links too, but I'm too somnolent this morning; just under 4 hours of sleep :(

Ritsumei said...

Thanks!

Jeanettea, you're probably not missing anything: it's just a blank white background so far, partly because I have yet to figure out how to do transparent backgrounds on my images, so all the images that I've made thus far have a plain white background. Easy to match, and relatively easy to fix them up with a transparent background later if I decide that I want to add a background image. Right now I'm still sort of playing around.

And I'm a chicken too... I save the template before I do anything, so if it all goes horribly wrong I can copy and paste the old one back in. I've got more that I want to do, but the basic idea is there for now. Not fancy at all, but bright.

misskate said...

PS. on the link within, I actually kind of like it on your page; the little thumbnails look good among all the bright colors against the white background.
.. though, to be honest, I'm not so much of a fan of that addition to the Less2Love blog.. I feel like the layout for that blog is much simpler and the link within looks kind of strange amidst all that text

Ritsumei said...

I'm glad you like the LinkWithin thing. I'm still deciding what I think, but knowing that someone else likes it is useful. As for L2L, it was never supposed to be there. I took it back off as soon as I realized it was on. I don't know if you'd noticed, but it was actually linking to THIS blog, not L2L. Oops. It's all better now though.

misskate said...

hehe.. I did wonder why it seemed that only your blog stuff was popping up.. but I wasn't sure, I thought that maybe it was just a conglomeration of various blogs, not just yours.

Ritsumei said...

Yeah, sorry about that. But it's all better now.

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