Blog Beautification Project Complete

For the past couple of months, I have been waffling over a change in the look of my blog. While I loved my old theme (Pressrow by Chris Pearson), it was definitely time for an upgrade. It is difficult to explain, but I think when the content of my blog has evolved from a largely personal chronicle to something a little more different, it makes sense that the blog’s appearance also change.

With change in mind, I went over various themes in the WordPress catalog, and finally settled on Vigilance.

What I love about Vigilance:

• The neat right-hand side sidebar text. While I generally liked Pressrow, I always hated the blue color text on the sidebar. I also disliked the appearance of the tag cloud. With Vigilance, everything is neatly aligned and looks just right 🙂
• I love the option to have a two-columned sidebar that is offered by Vigilance. This let me arrange all my various buttons and badges neatly without occupying any more space than is required. To visualize what I am saying, see the Show the Love and Follow Me sections at the bottom of my sidebar. These sections are actually two columns.
• I love the basic color scheme offered by Vigilance. In addition, Vigilance offers a lot of options to customize the colors. While I used the standard color scheme, the option to customize means that there are not too many blogs out there that look exactly like mine. For example, Doing Jalsa and Showing Jilpa also uses Vigilance, but the blog elements look quite different compared to mine (and mostly that has to do with the color scheme).

Apart from moving to a new theme, and rearranging my buttons and badges, I have also added a few more graphics…why? just to make things a little bit more fun and make the blog look a little less serious (I think Vigilance is a pretty mature/serious theme), and to suit my blog content, it definitely needed a little playfulness.

Enter Elegia’s Background Garden and Cute n Cool Blog Stuff. Both these sites have tons of ideas that you can use to design your blog. I loved them both. After a great deal of browsing, I ended up selecting my header image and the two Welcome to my Blog and I Love Comments graphics from Itkupilli’s Cute n Cool Blog Stuff (see the top right hand corner of my blog for these graphics).

Introducing these graphics into my WordPress blog is another long story. Blogger easily allows you to include graphics in your sidebar. WordPress however has a long-winded, unintuitive process. I tried a couple of methods, and then went on to Google to check how to do this, and Bingo! I was able to upload these images successfully.

I no longer can find the link that told me how to do this. But in case, you are interested, here is a short description of the procedure I followed:

1. Create a new post (work in HTML mode not Visual mode).
2. Click on the image icon to upload an image from your system into the new post.
3. Copy the code that appears in your blog post.
4. Go to the Widgets page and move a new Text widget to the sidebar.
5. Paste the code into the Text widget and click Save.

Voila! the image is in the sidebar.

I also used this method to add all my reading challenges into the sidebar.

Now, I finally feel my blog redesign is complete (at least for the time being).

So, what do you think? Below is a snapshot of my old blog theme.

Do you think my blog’s new look is an improvement? Why/why not? Any suggestions, feedback? I would love to hear from you…

P.S. Please, please do not judge my technical writing skills based on the itty-bitty procedure I have written here (hands wringing :))