Happy Friday! If you are currently viewing Swoon Worthy on a laptop, you may have noticed that things look a little bit different around here. It was niggling at me that the main photo I was using for the blog didn’t feel quite rightΒ any more. It was an overhead shot of my coffee tableΒ when there was a lot of turquoise in my home and since then, I have basically eradicated most of the turquoise not just from the living room but from the rest of my home too.

(If you looking at this on a mobile, then I’d encourage you to go have a look at the desktop or tablet site but I did some screen shots so you’ll get an idea for now!)

Here’s a screen shot from what the home page looked like just after I shared theΒ full redesign in January. (Excuse the fact that there’s a rolling header in the middle – it’s just the way the screen shot captured it because my screen isn’t large enough to capture the entire homepage at once!)

Swoon Worthy Jan 2015 Home Page

So having a main image which contained quite a bit of this colour felt – yes I’m going to say it – off brand… Sorry I’ve been in marketing for about 12 years and so I’m conscious of this sort of stuff! What do I mean by that in more simplistic terms?Β As nice as it was, it just felt like it wasn’t really ME any more.

Here’s the full background image:

Swoon Worthy - original background image to blog Jan 2015

Here’s a shot of what it looked like in August 2015 – you can see I’d made a few changes to the images used in the Home Tour, the About Me section and the How To section but that background image remained the same.

Swoon Worthy Homepage Screen Shot Aug 2015

Adding to that, I was conscious of the fact that it was difficult to read my logo against the background. It didn’t really pop out and the calligraphy font, while pretty, can be a bit hard to decipher. Being able to comfortably use my website is as important to me as someone being comfortable in my home. I want people to be able to relax and enjoy themselves when they are guests in my house and being a guest here on my little virtual home is no different. So, IΒ wanted to address that difficulty.

Anyway, I finally got around to doing something about it – not least because I was introduced to this really cool free tool called Peek by my lovely fellow Manchester blogger Old Fashioned SusieΒ and if you’re a blogger or you have your own site, you might be interested in this too. Essentially, they record a person’s first impressions of your site and it’s usability and send it to you. It’s 5 minutes of totally unbiased opinion from a stranger – which could be pretty valuable. I took it with a grain of salt, of course, because one person’s opinion isn’t necessarily going to be everyone’s opinion but hearing my ‘tester’ offering critique aboutΒ things that I already knew were issues was enough to spring me into action.

This is the replacement image I chose – another overhead shot of my coffee table!

Swoon Worthy coffee table overhead shot

And here’s the new look! (Again, excuse the rolling header – I really need to do a screenshot using a larger screen!)

Swoon Worthy Oct 2015 Home Page

I love the new colours – the black, white, pink, gold and leopard print feel so much more like me and I brightened up the logo as well to make it a bit easier to read. I also changed where the ‘About Me’ text because you couldn’t read it at all previously and changed some of my buttons in my sidebar and my social media pages to reflect the new look. It didn’t take me too long to give the blog a bit of a refreshΒ and I know it’s not a huge change or anything, but suddenly, I feel so much more at home here. I think sometimes it’s good to reassess what’s not working well for you when you are a blogger, to keep improving and to keep updating things that feel a bit ‘off’, don’t you?

I hope you like the new look!

 

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I also wanted to mention that I’m over on my friend Julia from Cuckoo4Design’s blog as part of her fabulous series, Living Pretty with Your Pets. Yep, an entire post dedicated to my fur babies!! Go check that out and whilst you are there, make sure you have a look around Julia’s gorgeous home (as seen below). I just love her style, she’s one of my favourites.

fall_home_2015_Cuckoo4Design_10

 

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So what do you think of the little mini rebrand? Do you think it’s more ‘me’ too? Is Peek a tool you’d consider using for your own site? You know how much I love hearing from you ;)

 

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