Blog Talk

We’re already over halfway through January and I’m still trying to gear up for the year to come! The blog is 10 years old this month, can you believe it?! It’s been a long and super fun road, let me tell you. Before I talk about my goals and resolutions for this year though, I’d like to go back and talk about a couple of changes that happened on the blog front first.

If you visit the blog much, you’ll have noticed the redesign that happened a few months back. I hope you all enjoy the new look and feel. Here’s the old one for reference, not too different visually, but most of the changes were on the back end. I worked with one of my favorite design team, Bloom. I’d bought ready-made templates from them in the past and loved their modern and minimalist philosophy. So when it came for a more customized design they were my go-to. Every detail has been thought over and designed for ease of use and aesthetics.

We reorganized the navigation as well – with the addition of the shop and well as our design services, the navigation needed a major overhaul. And speaking of the shop, Bloom designed that from top to bottom as well. I barely know how to write a post on WordPress let alone format the site 😉 Thankfully I found a great design team to do it for me, right?

You’ll notice that in addition to the search bar on the righthand side, we also added some additional search functionality on the daily finds and room redo pages. You can now search for finds by item and retailer. And you can also find room redos by specific rooms and styles. Pretty cool huh?

If you’re an email subscriber you also noticed a format change. Instead of showing the whole post, you now see only the featured image. The change was a mandatory one, unfortunately. The reasoning? The emails you receive are automated and affiliate linking in emails is prohibited by most advertisers. My blog is mostly supported by affiliate sales, so in order to be able to keep the blog running it’s a necessary evil. As a result, I had to stop all links from being sent out in my newsletters. The easiest way to guarantee that, was to cut text all-together. Hence the new email format.

I personally like the look of the new newsletter much, much better. But a bunch of you are unhappy with the new look. You guys miss seeing the comparisons in email format, without having to click over. I totally understand. So what I’m thinking is this…instead of the featured image or inspirational image shown in the newsletter, I’ll show the product comparison image. What do you guys think? A better compromise? That way you can see the products and click over only if you want more info. Sounds good?

And while I’m at it, I figured it was the perfect time to do a reader survey! Yay! It’s been awhile since we’ve had one of these and I’d love some feedback from you all! So go ahead, weigh in:

Thank you for your support!