A Refreshing Look

So if you haven’t noticed, I have been busy re-designing the look of the blog.  If you have checked the blog in the last several days you may have come at some point in the middle of redesign, sorry about that…there were a couple days where the blog looked like a total mess!  There are SEVERAL new features and links now.

I have included some pictures on the side that link to different posts that I have written in the past.  Since I am new to this whole blogging thing I don’t have many posts to refer to but I plan on changing these often.  At the top you will also notice I have included tabs.  I used to have “Eli’s Weekly Photo Project” on a completely different blog because I was such a newbie I had no idea how to link the 2 in a more convenient way.  Now you can easily click to his photo project page along with some other pages I have included.  One of the other pages I included that is worth noting is the “Our Wedding Album” page.  Three years ago I spent countless hours editing hundreds of pictures from our wedding.  In an effort to save money, I hired a photographer to simply take pictures and send them to me on a disc unedited.  I was delusional about the amount of time that would need to be dedicated to editing to get a half way decent picture.  Not to mention, the photographer didn’t bother white balancing inside the church and all of the pictures were yellow.  I broke out into tears when I opened the disc thinking they were not salvageable…luckily Digital Image Pro (basically Photoshop for people who don’t know Photoshop) came to the rescue.  After editing I made my own album using Picaboo.  I thought since Picaboo is already hosting the album I might as well include it on the old blog.  It is fun to go through; so many good memories from our wedding.

Yeah, we may have broke it down on our first dance...go check it out! ha

In the midst of making all of these changes, I have discovered I have an obsession passion for blog design.  I am by no means any good at it but I have fun tinkering and learning what can be done.  A lot of customization can be done with CSS coding, but I do not know any CSS coding so I have been putting in some major hours researching all the codes that can be used to get a very personal customization.  The only coding background I have is from college when I took C++ and I don’t remember any of it.  I will say though that I think it has helped me pick up on the CSS coding…on a couple of occasions something would not turn out how I wanted and I was able to identify the part of the code I needed to change without having to look it up.  This could be pure luck but I like to pride myself in thinking that it was all talent. ;-)  I don’t think that I have very many people reading this blog that actually have their own blog, let alone need any tips from me so I will spare you all on the details for how I got my blog to look this way.  If you do have a blog or are starting to think about making a blog and would like to know what I did just leave a comment or email me!  My contact information is listed under the “Contact Me” tab.  With enough response I will gladly post about my endeavors (the good, the bad, and the ugly) with blog design.

And again, for those of you who only read this blog to get another cute picture of Eli (probably most of my readers), here you go…