The perils of a make-over

I’m planned it, did my research and came up with what I thought would work best. From behind the safety of my desk, I cracked my knuckles and hit activate and behold, my new blog theme and darn, what were those greyed out images all about?

It would seem Featured Images are a compulsory feature of Oxygen. Unfortunately, none of my posts had Featured Images and those that did were not exactly landscape sized. After tweaking a few, I cowered behind my keyboard and and waved the white flag of defeat.  There was no way I was going through all my posts and fiddling with images. I’m an author, not a graphic designer. I resorted to plan B – Coraline.

She looked pretty in the preview, all colourful and simple…. except, no concise list of posts. Activating her, I quickly discovered the long scroll to the bottom of my blog and the footer with all the links. It felt like I’d plumped the depths of the screen. You see I write quite long posts sometimes – free chapters, short stories and they add up to a long trip to the bottom of the scroll bar.

No plan C.  The clock ticking. My blog now a mess. I picked another with no research or helpful tips from other bloggers. I went for the Morning After, because by now, that is was it felt like. An hour before my shift at the keyboard is due to finish and I activated the third theme of the day.

For some reason all my widgets vanished.

In a widgetless state, I’m now forced to start virtually from scratch. Finally, after re-sizing logos, images and digging up links, my blog reformed on the screen.

Actually, it goes to show not planning might be beneficial. I quite like this theme. For those coming from RSS feeds, you’ll see the usual view of my latest post, and for those coming to the blog’s home page, a digest of my latest post and hand picked feature posts from my archive (with easy thumbnails). These featured posts will be updated and changed from time to time according to my whim – oh the power I have over this blog is ….. not much, so let me play at it.

The menu is at the top – where a menu should belong.

And… there is a newsletter you can sign up for to receive the latest news of my books, works in progress, previews of short stories and the odd prize draw event. So SIGN UP!!!

Look to the right – it’s just there, see it?

Now I’m off for a long drink of something intoxicating.