Yeah, yeah, I’m still in love with our blog theme. I’m also now in love with Rentacoder.com, but I’m keeping that info for another post. Erin told me I needed to be careful or our new theme would be jealous. Ha! I just think I’ve got enough love to go around

So it’s official…we’ve switched over to a new host and a new look. There are still some admin things to attend to, but overall, it’s DONE. I found an awesome guy to customize this theme for us, freeing me up to work on other things. I’ll talk about him, too, in my upcoming RAC post.

Here’s the scoop on our new design: this is the Branford Magazine theme and I downloaded it for FREE. You know how much we love free around here! Inspired by Brian Gardner’s Revolutions theme and my friend Dennis’ new design, we wanted something that allowed us to keep the good stuff front and center, rather than pushing it to the end of the line like most blog themes do. The author of Branford Magazine is German, so his site is geared toward both German and English speakers. His English is excellent (much better than my German! ) so you should have little trouble with his directions.

Now, here’s a disclaimer: this magazine theme requires a learning curve to implement. Since it has a different way of handling posts, you’ll have to do some work to get it to display the way you want. It’s not as simple as plug-and-play.

Typically, I like to figure out everything for myself and have a hard time asking for help. This time, though, I almost immediately found and downloaded an excellent ebook to get this new theme running ASAP. And it was only $12.

Aisling D’Art is the creator the ebook, called Sites That Soar! Aisling is an artist first, so her directions are very clear and she includes plenty of screenshots to walk you through the process. Naturally, she can’t include every modification you may want, but you’ll be satisfied with a good looking, usable blog within an hour or two of installation following her techniques. I did find a couple of typos in the ebook and when I emailed Aisling about it not only was she gracious about my email, but, within 24 hours, she had made the changes and updated her ebook with the correct info. I love that!

If your blog is ready for a makeover, consider using a magazine theme. Every now and again, we’ll update you on visitor satisfaction. We hope to see much improvement with visitor involvement due to our new look!

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