Out With The Old, In With The New

I used to have a free blog over at WordPress.com, but I really wanted to have a custom logo, a better design, and link to my Instagram account. I also wanted to use my own domain name: nataliebourn.com. (My mom bought that for me when I was born – we’re total geeks!)

So I hired my parents!

Well kind of… I didn’t pay any money, but I was put into BaseCamp (their software to manage client projects) because my mom and dad worked with me like they would a real client.

They own their own design company called Bourn Creative and build really awesome sites. I wanted a cool one like the ones they make-I totally got one!

Most projects take a long time, but since I’m such an amazing client, it went really fast. *wink wink*

Here’s what we did!

Logo Design: I obviously needed something with elephants – That was a requirement. So my mom designed a few different concepts for me to review and I picked my favorite – the one with the biggest elephant and easiest to read type.

Typography: DON’T WORRY! That’s just a fancy design word for the design and style of the content (words). We wanted to make sure my content looked great on big computers and tiny phones. And I wanted pink. Lots of pink.

Color Palette: I wanted something fun and bright… like me! We knew there must be pink, so we spent some time browsing through Shutterstock looking for interesting or fun textures with pink in it. When we found the rainbow you see on my site now, I knew it was the one right away!

Website Design: This was the fun part… designing the home page, about page, and blog. The new home page was fun because before, my old site had the blog on the home page. That was ok, but I wanted it to have its own page design. My mom and I then worked together to design the templates for the site in Photoshop.

Website Development: My mom does design and my dad does development (that means he actually builds the site and makes it work).

He added all sorts of cool features like Infinite scroll, my Instagram widget in the sidebar, quote formats, an awesome home page that’s super easy to update, and featured images on blog posts.

He even made my favicon (the tiny image next to my website URL at the top of the browser) and the little image next to a comment (if you don’t have a photo) the same elephant from my logo! How cool is that?!

Import: When my site was ready, my dad had to move my WordPress.com blog posts over to my new site – I didn’t want to lose any of those posts! Unfortunately, at the end I had to say bye to my old site… KIDDING! I don’t miss that thing at all!!

Content Clean Up: This is when we did stuff like:

• Added a featured image – that big one at the top
• Added a more tag so the whole post doesn’t show on the main page
• Moved my photo galleries to after the more tag (Well, most of them)
• Cleaned up the categories and tags

Test Everything: We had to test everything before launch time. I didn’t want to launch it with errors in it.

LAUNCH TIME: My new site it live! (Happy Dance)

Now I need to up my game!

First things first, I have to do some training with my parents (just like a real client) to learn how my site works. Then, I can start using come of the awesome new features and use categories and tags better. ☺

Some Technical Details: For the pros reading this:

• My site is a responsive, HTML5 WordPress site with Schema.org support
• It is a custom child theme running on the Genesis Framework by StudioPress
• It was designed by Bourn Creative
• It is hosted at WP Engine (They have the best t-shirts… I’m actually wearing one as I’m writing this)

Phew! I think this is the longest blog post I have ever written … but probably not the longest I will ever write.

I hope you liked my recap of how we made my new blog.

You can connect with me on Instagram and Twitter, and subscribe to my blog by email below… because you know you never want to miss anything I post, right?!