I’m being totally self-indulgent here and doing something I love when I see it on other sites. I’m going to take some time and talk about how I’ve have put together the site and the design elements I’m using to (hopefully) make things look pretty.
Here’s the down and dirty as of August November 2009-
Web Host – BlueHost
Blogging Platform – WordPress
Theme – Thesis from DIY Themes. Not only does the theme kick ass – the designer’s website and community forum do as well. It has been well worth the $$ spent since I wanted the site to look really nice and needed some help to get things the way I wanted. I was able to upgrade the theme myself with minimal issues and minimal time invested. For someone who is barely tech-literate that was GREAT!
Favorite Plug-Ins – Thesis Openhook goes hand in hand with the theme. It’s made it extremely easy to do some of the things I wanted without spending hours and hours tinkering and messing up (which is my current modus operandi when it comes to dealing with anything that has HTML involved!) I LOVE the quote rotator plug-in, I am reading, Theme My Profile, and Theme My Login.
Fonts – Fonts are so much FUN! There are tons of choices. The two fonts found in the header image are Good Eatin AEO and Louisiana. I bought them at MyFonts.com. The font used everywhere else on the site is Georgia. It’s a serif typeface that looks really good on the screen (it’s very readable) which is always a plus!
I fussed around trying to find a nice color palate that looks good on the computer screens of the Mac and Dell computers we have coming in and out of the house. It took a while for something to gel that I liked that didn’t seem to echo all the pastel colors of childhood too much wasn’t an echo of all the lilac colored breastfeeding sites out there. That was hard because I like purple as much as all the other people who had gotten there before me! Anyway, COLORlovers was a great site to just wander around in and window shop palates! TONS and TONS of neat palates were there. The great thing about Thesis is it allows me to make the changes to the non-graphic parts of the site in a snap so when I want to change the color palate of the site it’ll literally take me less than 15 mintes in the design options and the .css file. *huge grin*
Color Palette – Colors are left to right
#606060 | #303030 | #4b9b98 | #a24a71 | #92b842 | #8ecfcc | #694a93 | #d8f0ef | #e9f7ca
I’ve gone out and purchased some breastfeeding images just to be able to make headers and stuff when I wanted. The two best places for that pricewise are fotolia.com and iStockphoto.com. There are also sites where you can download free graphics. The ones I’ve been to (and keep returning to are Stock.XCHNG, flickr.com’s Creative Commons area and freefoto.com. Another interesting site I’ve stumbled upon recently is fotopedia.
I made a favicon too! I am pretty psyched about that actually! You will find that I am sometimes exceptionally easy to please. I used Adobe Photoshop to make the image and then went to DynamicDrive to make the .ico file. From there it was extremely easy to upload the .ico file to the site and have it start showing up in my browser windows. I feel like I have arrived now that I have my very own, pretty creative if I do say so myself, favicon making the rounds.
Edited: November 9th, 2002
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I can’t wait to see it finished!!! This is going to be a fantastic blog!