Blog Makeover 2

Project: Blog Makeover 2

Completion Time: 2 days

Stardust Lores second header

Blog Makeover 2 happened because when I woke three or four days after pimping Stardust Lores, I realized that the Signerica font didn't stand out with the whole blog design.  So I then proceeded to look for a new cursive font that would make a good fit not only for the graphic but to the overall blog design as well.  As usual, Dafont is my go-to place whenever I'm need of a good font and well, I managed to find Laser Metal which looked really cool.  It's somewhat quirky, unconventional for the usual cursive manner of writing and yet, it still retained that vibe of whimsiness in it.  With a little fiddling of the layout, the new header was created (see above).

Satisfied, I immediately tackled another concern: a drop down menu for my main navigation bar. I know that people can live without them but I just can't.   When I was still a newbie blogger three to four years ago, I also started in Blogspot but my only concern during that time was the content of my posts.  I didn't really put a lot of attention of how my blog would look like.  Of course, I still exerted an effort to make my blog presentable in terms of design but I didn't have much care about:

• whether it's responsive or not
• if my main navigation bar is already cluttered because there's no option of putting drop down menus
• etc.

Months later of blogging though, I managed to interact with a lot of book bloggers and that's when I was introduced to the more technical aspect of blogging: coding and designing.  I swear, I didn't expect that I'd feel envious and inspired at the same time looking at the other bloggers' blog. They were all pretty and reader-friendly.  And so to make the story short, I mustered my courage to transfer to Wordpress.org (not Wordpress.com!) because it seems easier to design a pretty blog there compared to Blogspot (well, as long as you have the right theme).  Well, Wordpress.org is really awesome and even newbies without experience in CSS and HTML can design their blog just by inserting the images into their correct slots and tweaking the settings.  And guess what, Wordpress.org themes come with a drop down menu so I didn't have to code a single thing unlike in Blogger.  In simpler terms, blogging in Wordpress.org for more than two years really upped my standards when it comes to blog design and layout.  Unfortunately, I have to take a break from blogging last year due to time constraints and so I terminated my Wordpress.org blog.

But hey, I'm back right now but decided to start in Blogspot because with my unstable schedule, it's the platform that's really practical for me at the moment.  Even if I take a long hiatus from blogging, I wouldn't be wasting money (you have to pay for hosting and domain name in Wordpress.org!) with Blogspot because it's absolutely free.  The downside is that you have to work hard for a lot of things in Blogger to achieve some of the features offered by Wordpress.org themes.  Like for example, the drop down menu.  If you are like me who's basically afraid to touch the CSS/HTML code of a blogger template for fear of messing up that giant block of code, then placing a drop down menu in Blogger (for the unaware, there's no way you can put a drop down menu in the pre-made Blogger template without tweaking and adding some code) is almost like jumping into an unknown abyss. 

But jump I must because I have a lot of things to put in the main navigation bar and I don't like  it looking so cluttered.  So what I did was to make a backup of my existing template and search Google for tutorials on how to create a drop down menu in blogger.  Luckily, there are so many design sites that offered tutorials in written and video formats. This tutorial really helped me a lot and after some hours of tweaking and making sure that I inserted the code on the right place, here's the final result:

Really so happy that it turned out okay and that the designing gods are with me.

Other changes:

• made the blog posts appear as excerpts/summaries instead of appearing as whole posts(who wants to scroll non-stop just to look at the other posts?)
• added a customized reading progress bars (I thought I was never going to find a decent one)
• placed a COPYRIGHT notice on the right footer