Lately, I’ve been working hard to get a new layout for KittyClysm up and running. In case you need a refresher, or hadn’t seen the old layout at all or on a desktop computer before, this is what the site used to look like:
I loved the old layout on many counts. I thought it was unique, pretty, and anything besides plain.
But over the months and countless attempts trying to tweak it to be just what I needed, I decided I would probably be better off starting from scratch.
The things that bothered me about the old theme:
- It was just a bit too messy.
This was especially true of individual pages where being able to read the content easily is obviously incredibly important. - It didn’t look good on mobile.
I hated browsing my site with the old layout on mobile. Which sucks, because I know a lot of people use mobile to browse sites these days. To make it a lot easier to use on mobile, I had no idea where to begin with changes to my old layout. I definitely needed a new theme if the site was going to be up to scratch in this regard. - It was a bit slow.
I’m not sure why, but some themes are just a little (or a lot!) laggier than others. The next theme I chose had to be pretty fast out-of-box, so that with all the images I post on this blog, the site wouldn’t get to be too clunky and take forever to load.
So I started searching for themes, and finding nothing like what I wanted, decided to tweak an existing theme one to be virtually unrecognizable – hopefully morph it into something that I liked!
It worked! I love the new layout. In my opinion, it’s simple, easy to read, and yet not too boring which is what I was always worried might happen if I chose a simple layout. Well it started out a bit boring, but I think with the colour pops I’ve added here and there, it’s a lot less so.
Just in case you’re on mobile and don’t know how the theme looks on desktop, this layout is what resulted:
I love it! I’m sure I’ll be working out kinks for ages, but so far I’m pretty obsessed.
If there’s something about the new layout you think should be tweaked or doesn’t work properly on your device, please let me know! Would really appreciate it!
Hopefully, the new layout leads to me post more, because as I said in a blog post on my personal blog before, whenever I change my layout to something new and pretty that I really love, I always seem to go on a posting rampage immediately after. So looking forward to the added motivation! 🙂
Anyhow – hope you like the new layout as much as I do!
Ellen Pilch says
It looks great!
Elise Xavier says
Thanks, Ellen! 🙂
Hairballs and Hissyfits says
love the new layout–can’t wait to read more about Avery!
Elise Xavier says
Thanks so much! 🙂 Looking forward to having you!
Brian Frum says
Your blog looks terrific and it is nice and clean,, great job!
Elise Xavier says
Thank you so much, Brian! 🙂 Glad to hear you like it.