Time for a Blog Makeover
Maybe it’s been sitting on the sofa while my wife watches all of her “makeover” TV shows, you know the ones, the beauty makeover and home renovation shows that are all the big programming fills these days?! In any case, I think that catching bits and pieces from those has finally prompted me to do a refresh on the Resort Marketing blog. After a good chunk of browsing around a whole slew of themes I finally landed on Mystique by digitalnature as I liked a lot of the built-in components to it along with the fact that it uses the very nifty 960 grid system design layout and I liked a clean and simple look, which I feel it affords.
For those of you that work with WordPress, you have possibly dealt with the difficultly of testing a them out before it’s activated – there is a “preview” option, but it’s difficult to see how all of your widgets, images and plugins will work with the them in a preview. I followed instructions I found on WordPress.org and on a Mac, it’s a sweet and simple process to setup a dev environment on your local machine, there are also instructions for doing the same on a windows computer that look just as quick. Once installed locally, you just need export your blog via the export function under “Tools”, import that file into your new dev environment and then start testing and tweaking new themes to your heart’s content. I couldn’t find a quick and simple way to transfer my new theme with my header and background images to production, but since I had already created my images and configured the blog, simply copying the theme elements via FTP and then making a few quick tweaks had me up and running with a “madeover” blog in very little time, but with quite a bit of confidence that I’d tested and made sure that things will be running smoothly.
I’m interested to know what you think of the new look for the Resort Marketing Blog so please leave me a comment with your thoughts and also, please let me know if you find anything that didn’t make it smoothly through the transition, enjoy!
Photo credit: Flickr user Patrishe (I added the text)
Welcome to my "Resort Marketing" blog. I hope that you will consider subscribing to my blog's feed or leaving a comment on this post. I look forward to seeing you again soon and thank you for visiting!
Looks great, Eric!
Thanks Greg.
Site looks great!
I like the new look although it has lost some of its winter/snow feel. Nice job on the makeover though, I have been contemplating it for my very inactive blog and meh, I figure there's plenty of other things I need to do
I checked out the blog on FF, IE and Chrome and in all programs your RSS and Twitter icons are stuck behind/underneath the gray bar that has your Home and About buttons. Also I notice a gap between that gray bar and your Resort Marketing header.. Not sure if you are aware of it or not but I thought I would let you know.
Thanks for the feedback Martin. I did try to use the snow background image for a winter feel, but it's certainly a switch from having winter photos for each header – I'm still adjusting to it myself. The top icons are supposed to "pop up" when moused over, I've already moved them up a bit from the default level. The other gap is just between the header I created and the menu bar, not sure if I like it, but the moving RSS and Twitter icons ensure that I can't close it up readily. Cheers!