6th Blog Revamp + Tips to Spice Up Your Blog

I felt indifferent about my blog for a really long time particularly after the whole Pipdig debacle. I loved their themes so much (having purchased 3 of their themes myself!) but all those accusation about Pipdig were somehow getting to my head and although a part of me is still not believing that they would do something sketchy like that, another part is just begging me to change my theme. I did change my theme back in April but I didn’t really like that theme as much as my Pipdig one so I changed back to Pipdig and used it up until a few days ago when I bought a new one from Etsy that I really love.

Over the past few months, I somehow got over the whole magazine-style blog look because I felt burdened that I had to have perfectly curated blog posts with glossy photos. I even thought about using my tumblr blog for posts that I thought weren’t going to fit this blog and I think it’s so stupid of me because this is my blog and I can do and post whatever I want on it and there is absolutely no need for me to blog on Tumblr for personal and spontaneous hey-I-wrote-this-in-20-minutes posts when I can just post it here. To be able to do that, I wanted a blog theme that would fit my lifestyle, glossy, photoshopped DSLR photos and also just photos that I take with my iPhone and edit with Snapseed.

I went browsing on Etsy last Monday and found this cute theme (the one I’m using) so I checked out the other themes by this designer and did comparison of all her themes and I still think the one that I’m currently using was the perfect one for my blog. To make the whole thing better, it was on 60% sale until 31st July. SCORED RIGHT THERE! I did encounter a few problems with my Disqus comments but the designer was quick to find the solution which I’m thankful for because although it’s only a small Etsy shop, she helped me with my problems and even willing to contact Disqus herself. Kudos to her, Kristina, from Luxi Bee Design. By the time this post is published, the sale is ending in about 20 hours so if you’re a WordPress user, you should check it out.

Some Helpful Tips to Spice Up Your Blog

Buy a new theme. You can not go wrong with a fresh new theme for your blog. If you don’t have the cash, there are tons of free themes available but if you do have some spare cash, it’s not wrong to spend it on a brand new theme.
Change your profile photo + About page. Changing your profile photo and About page once or twice a year is encouraged because probably some of the information on your About page aren’t relevant anymore or you have a brand new cute selfie that can be used for profile photo. I recently edited my Contact page.
Find a new theme/accent colour. Another thing that I always do once a month is picking a new theme or accent colour for my blog. Monochrome blogs are versatile but adding one or two pop of colours can help in spicing up your blog a little bit. Some of the things you can do is changing the link colour or your top sticky navigation bar.
Change your body + heading fonts. Sometimes you can get tired of your body font so what you can do is find a new font that you like – I always go to fonts.google.com – and choose the font weight. You can also add letter spacing and increase the line height. It will make a lot of difference, I promise.
Change your post + homepage layout. I think all themes support sidebar and full width layout so if you don’t want to fork out for a new theme, you can always customise your theme and choose a different homepage or post layout. Maybe you want a sidebar homepage and full width post layout – it’s all up to you.
Solve backend blog issues. If you’re a self-hosted WordPress user, you would know all the backend stuff of the blog that you have to configure yourself. Recently, I fixed the SSL Certificate for my blog url (from http:// to https://), solved the failure of activating Jetpack plugin (I lost 4 months worth of pageviews!), and learned how to use FTP file manager (lifechanging!). It might sound quite daunting but I promise you it’s not that complicated at all. My hosting provider has the best customer service and is always helping me with my blog problems.