(*This is an ongoing little mini diary of the process of redesigning my website. Posts will be added daily or almost daily until I have a beautiful and functional new website.)
Well, my new website is still under construction and I have much to add and change still but already it is starting to do its intended job. (*Working for me while I am doing other things like running after my toddler or sleeping…)
I’m getting more random opportunities via my contact form than usual. Also more people than usual have signed up to take online courses from my website (I know because of the name of the coupon codes) and more people than usual per day have been signing up for my mailing list. So that’s very encouraging as I’m not doing any special marketing or promotions at this time.
I spent much of this week tweaking the home page, adding new About, Portfolio, and Contact pages using the Divi Builder, setting up my Mailmunch/Mailchimp plugin for optin forms, reactivating some of my usual plugins such as Facebook Like, NextGen Gallery, Yoast SEO, Sucuri, and the all important Akismet.
I also went in and took old formatting off some of the other main secondary pages, particularly in the portfolio categories pages, Services/ Educator/ Online Courses pages, and the Blog area. I’m still not happy with the main blog area because I took out all thumbnail images because they were scaling up too big and looking hideous. I have yet to get icons or smaller images in there to my liking.
I have only heard good things about the Elegant Themes plugins Bloom and Monarch so I will start experimenting with those next. I need to add to my Portfolio page and give a little more TLC to my sidebar and footer area as well as add a Privacy Policy.
I also eventually would like to do a new logo that has my name and “artist, educator, author” underneath to better represent what this new site is about. For a more professional look, I’d like to match the site font on the tagline as I hate having two different sans-serif fonts up in my header. That’s just ugly and my future site is not ugly. 🙂
Anyway, that’s the latest. I’m also working on making my redesign experience a course so stay tuned. Phew!
If you’d like to see the website’s current state, it can be found here: https://kpalana.com
Best wishes,
Kristen
I'm an artist and educator seeking to empower ordinary people to do extraordinary things.