Blogging 101: Website Development
Here’s to starting a new series on the blog! I’m hoping to add fun tips and tricks on this segment to provide insight when starting your own blog! This first one will be focused on website development and the updates I recently took with my own page!! If you’ve been following along for a while, you’ve probably seen the transitions in my blog and hopefully love the new look with Bluechic.
While I spent a lot of time during my first few months of blogging trying to design my own template, I realized it wasn’t my forte and I quickly found the time I was investing on trying to code and change free WordPress templates was not achieving the look I wanted. I found out about Bluchic and instantly fell in love with tons of their downloadable templates.
Bluchic offers several wordpress themes that provide further personalization to make your blog or website exactly what your looking for! I spent a few minutes on each themes “live preview” which actually lets you look at the website in function, and decided the Isabella Theme was the right choice for me for a few reasons:
- Bold name: this theme provides a very bold name title, replaceable with your logo, and I love that it fills the entire field of view. This reminds all your viewers the title of your blog which keeps them thinking of the name associated with your content; very important!
2. This is my second favorite feature to the Isabella theme: surrounding boxes. I probably spent 2+ hours trying to figure this out myself and never officially got it on my old site, and am so happy to finally have it! Y’all know I love a good girly touch, and this is one of those touches that makes me feel that my personality is reflected on my site.
3. The rotating slider: This is what really made me fall in love with the Isabella theme. I love being able to display my most recent blog posts on this slider as an incentive to see the photos quickly and click on the image to read the post. A photo is worth 1000 words and being able to see a quick picture of the final post is a great way to not only display the post in another area, but also hopefully gets more traffic to that post that may be further down on the home page.
Install
The install for the Bluchic themes is BEYOND easy! I’m positive that anyone can do this, and if you have any trouble, there is 24 hour assistance on their website and they are very responsive. I installed and had the Isabella Theme up and running within 2 hours and had almost all the personalization I was looking for within that time period. I also have had two updates to the theme since installing, and with WordPress, its an easy one click update with no back-end work.
Overall, this update in website development has been one of my biggest achievements personally, because I actually sat down and thought about how my brand wasn’t being displayed correctly on my old site and needed an update. I have found that the Isabella theme, with my personal tweaking, now displays myself and the brand I want to share from the Kraus house.
I hope if any of you all are bloggers or have a website of your own that you’ve been struggling to update and personalize, that Bluchic may be your saving grace like it was for me and could find a theme that works for you! Click the link below to see their WordPress themes and other templates they promote on their site for helping bloggers keep their branding on point and consistent throughout social media platforms!
I’m excited to welcome this series to the blog and if you have any questions you’d like me to address in the next post related to blogging comment below as I love to create content you’re looking for!
XOXO Hannah K.