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I gave my blog a makeover

When I originally started Butterfly Mind, I planned my site to be an online home for writing. I wanted words to be the focus – I didn’t foresee using photographs at all – and I selected Oulipo, a journalist theme (layout), to highlight that intention.

Butterfly Mind site using Oulipo theme
Butterfly Mind with Oulipo theme

That was almost three years ago.

Recently, I’ve been feeling the limitations of that choice. I’ve started posting more images on my site, and my original theme was not kind to photography. The column was too narrow to showcase landscape layouts, and there were no options to feature images.

But aside from that, I felt an itch to move the furniture.

Back in June, Cheri Lucas Rowlands wrote about her choice to redesign her blog. She got my wheels turning, and I think I browsed the WordPress.com theme showcase at the time – just to see. I didn’t do anything with my site then, but the seed had been planted. Though I didn’t water or feed it, it grew anyway.

When I returned from Hawaii, I returned inspired. More fluid. Vulnerable to beauty. The past few nights I’ve been staying up, computer on my lap in the big comfy chair, while my husband watches The Walking Dead. I signed up for a free site, set it to private, imported all of my content from Butterfly Mind, and started playing with themes.

I tried several that didn’t suit me, then found a post highlighting themes for writers on Hot Off the Press, the WordPress.com news blog. From there I narrowed my choices down to two. I tweaked widget areas, played with featured images, rearranged menus. And I ultimately decided (with our 9 year old daughter’s help) on Hemingway Rewritten; I was a little giddy that the theme that works best for my blog is named for one of my favorite authors.

The influence of Hawaii is obvious in my color choices and header image, and what I love about Hemingway Rewritten is that it still offers a sidebar like my previous theme, but it eliminates a third column by moving the menu to the top.

Butterfly Mind site using Hemingway Rewritten theme
Butterfly Mind with Hemingway Rewritten theme

Now photographs can take up more space. They can breathe. And I particularly love that I can customize a particular post’s header by attaching a featured image, like here, here, and here. Of course, that means I need to go through nearly 300 posts to attach featured images, but that’s okay – my husband has a lot of Walking Dead to watch.

19 thoughts on “I gave my blog a makeover”

    1. I struggled with that too. I really loved the Bloggy theme but now that I’ve changed once, I’m sure I’ll want to change again. I didn’t want to be locked into a theme that I had paid a lot of money for.

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      2. Yes, i think it’s worth it to make your blog a place *you* want to spend time. I am surprised by how a layout change has totally refreshed my relationship with my site. I find myself wanting to spend more time here now, and am inspired to engage more. I think that’s worth paying for, and if i couldn’t achieve what I wanted with a free option I would have paid for a theme.

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  3. I thought about changing my theme and I even spent hours going through the different choices. I would’ve gone with Hemingway Rewritten too, actually, but it just didn’t feel right and I stayed with my current theme (Sight). It definitely wasn’t time wasted though, because it caused me to reevaluate exactly what I want my blog to feature–just like you did.

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  4. This is a nice theme. I played around with a few as well, since I just switched blogs themes and hosts. It is a process if you don’t know what you are doing. Your blog looks great, and I really like the theme you chose. I’ll have to keep this one in mind for later. 🙂

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  5. Can you explain why you signed up for a new blog and imported all your content rather than just changing the theme on your existing blog? I like the new look. I use Oulipo myself and although I like it I’m aware of the limitations. Thanks for an interesting insight into how you went through the process.

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    1. Sure 🙂 The main reason I set up a test site was that I didn’t want to feel pressured to have to make a decision right away. I did a lot of rearranging of widgets, menus, and headers in each theme I demo-ed, and I looked at many of my pages and posts with images and without images to see what they would look like in each theme.

      I didn’t want to make the changes live, and I didn’t want to set my site to private for as long as I knew it would take me to play and make a decision (the process took me a few days). I also wanted to let a theme sit overnight and then look at it again in the morning, and again, I didn’t want all this to be happening on my live site while I tried to make a decision. I wanted a quiet, private place to test.

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  8. I love your new look! I almost went with this same theme when I changed my theme a few months back for many of the same reasons you listed. It’s a great theme, but I went with Isca, which I also love but for completely different reasons. I may need to take another look at this one. 🙂

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