Friday Favourites – New Changes to the Ol’ Blog

In less than a month, I’ll have been blogging on Small Home Big Start for four years! It’s a little hard to believe that I’ve documented almost every craft, DIY project and recipe that I’ve made in that time. It feels like I’m just getting started! There have been many changes to the blog in the last few weeks and I’m sharing them for today’s Friday Favourites.

 

1. The New Design

You may have noticed that last month I redesigned the blog. It was a long process, involving a migration from Blogger to WordPress, but it has been so worth it. I used this awesome template from Angie Makes and I’m totally in love with the design. If you’re thinking of redoing your blog or website, check this gal out.

There are still a few hiccups with the migration (like it reformatted all my pictures to the left and then took out the spaces between words and images), but I’m slowly getting it all fixed up. With almost 2000 posts to reformat, it’s going to take a while, but the content is all there – so enjoy!

 

Some things that did work out (and were awesome) are the project galleries. Now it’s easy to navigate through all my tutorials, with a helpful drop down menus listing Everyday Projects, Seasonal Projects and Holiday Projects. I love how the galleries make it easy to see all the projects and you just have to hover over them for the title to appear.

I also added some more social link buttons and a Pin It button. I’ve got a few more ideas up my sleeves, but you’ll see those roll out over the next couple of months as we get into the holiday season.

 

2. My First Blog Conference

I’m so excited to be going to BlogPodium tomorrow. After almost four years of blogging, I final bit the bullet and decided to attend some conferences this year, including Blissdom Canada next month as well.

 

Tomorrow’s speakers sound fantastic and I can’t wait to meet so many fellow Canadian bloggers! I don’t know if I’ll be able to sleep tonight with all this excitement. I’m sure I’ll be up at 2 am thinking about what I’m going to wear…and then changing it last minute before I go out the door.

 

3. New Business Cards

I’ve had business cards for the blog since the beginning, but they were the cheap kind that you can print at home. I never really thought about having them professionally printed until now and I wish I’d done it sooner. It wasn’t that much money, but the results were fantastic.

 

I designed my own cards (thank you film school for offering a photoshop course) using the new blog header and social icons. I added a QR code which makes it easy for people to scan it with their phones, bringing them right to the web address. I’ve got a big stack of them ready to take with me tomorrow!

 

4. Blog Media Kit

I also designed something that is new to me – a media kit. Now that I’m starting to talk to more companies about opportunities to work together, I wanted to have something to email them or give them in print at the conferences.

 

It has a little bio about me, blog statistics, contact information, opportunities available and some photos of a few of my favourite posts (it was hard to pick just 10!). I printed them at a print shop nearby on nice cardstock to give them a little more weight. I hope they’re well received!

 

5. Editorial Calendar Plug-In for WordPress

I’ve talked about how I blog before and one of the key things that I do is keep an editorial calendar for upcoming posts. It helps me focus on what I want to share every month and let’s me see what upcoming projects or recipes I need to tackle.

 

I’ve always done it in a Word document, but I just discovered the Editorial Calendar Plug-In for WordPress. It let’s me plan out my posts from wherever I’m blogging, instead of maintaining the one document at home. You can even drag and drop your post ideas about the calendar, and it shows you what you have posted, and what is still a draft. This is more of a behind-the-scenes pieces, but I thought it might be helpful to fellow bloggers out there.

 

Hope you all have a fantastic weekend!