(*This is the last post of an ongoing little mini diary I’ve been keeping about the process of redesigning my website.)

All right. Here it is, the post you’ve all been (OK, I have been) waiting for. I think my website has thoroughly been made over!

 

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  • I went from rethinking what content I wanted (and didn’t want) on my new site to organizing all that content into a navigation chart. I thought about my “vibe” or tone, color scheme, fonts, layout, and visuals. I chose and finally committed to a new Elegant Theme WordPress theme, Divi.
  • I learned as much as I could digest about the new theme and did some tutorials and did some research to see how it worked.
  • I backed up my entire site, deleted old themes and old plugins, downloaded and installed Divi, made a child theme, and pressed the “ACTIVATE” button.
  • It then.. looked horrible. So I went through and fixed my menu and header, favicon and logo, dove in and made a new home page, and later redid all my main secondary pages. I tweaked widgets and plugins, adjusted settings, and swapped around lots of images.
  • I now have the Elegant Themes plugins Monarch (for social media sharing) and Bloom (for email opti-in forms) installed and running as well as some new plugins via Jetpack and some old favorites like Akismet, Sucuri, Facebook Like, NextGen Gallery, and others.

It’s been a heck of a journey but I am glad I took it. I’m much happier with my new website and it’s already doing its job: getting me more online students, more freelance work and random job offers, social media followers, and friendly folks just stopping by to say hello.

It’s NOT perfect of course and I still have things to tweak and add, for example inserting a privacy policy in my footer menu and more SEO in my older blog posts. At the moment though, my website is looking less like an Ugly Duckling and more like a Beautiful Swan.

If you’ve been following along with me, thanks for taking the journey and I hope I answered some of your questions along the way. If you’d like to go through an easy, step-by-step process of revamping YOUR website and are considering using Divi or any Elegant Theme, I invite you to look out for my new Udemy course,  Divi For Beginners: Give Your WordPress Website a Makeover which will hopefully be live next week here.

If you want to get a FULL web design foundation, I also have a comprehensive web design course (the online version of my University Web Design 1 course) called: Web Snax: Super Simple Recipes for Easy Website Design. My new Divi course will automatically be added as the last section in Web Snax in the coming days.

So, if you want to see my styling new website, it can be found at https://kpalana.com. Kick your shoes off and stop on over and feel free to say hi or leave feedback.

Best wishes and thanks again for reading!

Kristen