I have a confession. You probably already know this. But...I suck at blog design. This is not my strong suit AT ALL. I know nothing about coding. I'm not very good at design in general, so even if I was good at coding, I wouldn't know what to do with my blog anyway. I keep thinking about having someone overhaul my blog, but then I'm too lazy or don't have the money or whatever the case may be. I do try to do some of my own stuff here and there. And I did tweak some stuff last weekend. (Really subtle changes, it's okay if you didn't notice.) But the fact is, I suck.
What I do have on my blog, I've learned through watching tutorials and then spending painstaking hours trying to figure it out on my own blog. Just this past weekend, I FINALLY fixed my drop-down menus. It wouldn't let you hover over them. If you hovered, they would disappear and basically made them unusable. So that's not good. They were like that for months. MONTHS. Not because I didn't want to fix them. Because I tried and couldn't figure it out and then would get frustrated and give up. And so continues the vicious cycle. Last weekend, I decided to give it another go. I had determined that the problem was in my CSS, not my HTML. It's a pretty big deal that I even know the difference between the two. Lots of research people.
So I started messing with my CSS. For hours. I scoured the internet, trying to find a solution. Finally, after literally like two hours, I came across this piece of CSS code that looked similar to mine, but had one extra line. Long story short, I copied that line of code, tweaked it to match the other lines of code I already had and bam! It was fixed. You would think I felt a huge sense of accomplishment. I did. But I was also so angry. ONE FREAKING LINE OF CODE??? ONE!!! I SPENT HOURS TRYING TO FIGURE THIS OUT FOR ONE STUPID LINE?
And this, my friends, is why I'm not good at blog design. Because I do not have the patience to sit there and do crap like that all the time. Mad kudos to those who love coding and making things pretty. Seriously, so many props. I love all of you. I could never ever do that all the time. (Ahem, hence why my drop-downs were broken for so long...) But I am happy that I've learned the little bit that I have since I started blogging.
My blog probably won't ever be voted best design. It won't be the prettiest kid on the block. But I think that it looks okay. It's organized, has a personal touch to it and I'm proud of what I've done.
Are you good at blog design? If not, how do you do your blog design? Hire someone else? Learn from tutorials? Just mess around with it?
Oh, and here are two awesome bloggers who put up great tutorials all the time:
Ashley @ Nosegraze (She does more wordpress stuff than blogger)
Stephanie and Jessica @ These Paper Hearts (These ladies do more blogger than wordpress)
When I redid my blog design, I spent forever looking for a free responsive Blogger template, which I finally found, and then forever x2 adjusting it to work for me. I still know very little HTML and CSS (I pretty much just Googled how to do specific things as I wanted to change them) and I ran into many of those "two-hour search results in one changed line of code" instances. It's definitely a challenge, but I enjoyed the little I learned. :)
ReplyDeleteI know, right? It's so freaking hard. That's pretty much what I've done on everything. Just google, google, google. I've looked at things that I kind of want to do and then basically played around with the code to make it work for me (for two hours since I also know nothing about HTML and CSS). It is very rewarding though after all that time to know that you did it yourself though.
DeleteTo be honest, I don't care that much about blog design. I mean, I notice if it's too busy, but other than that, I just like clean and simple. (I did notice your banner change, by the way...cute!)
ReplyDeleteBut when it comes to something not working, like your drop-down menus, I can see wanting to fix that, and yes, it can be frustrating because some things take so long. I have noticed that you do some cool things, with art and boxes and different fonts and I have absolutely no clue how to do that with blogger. Oh well! You should do a post on how to do that stuff!! :) ~Pam
Thank you!
DeleteI've thought about doing tutorial posts, but then I kind of worry that people will ask me a million questions that I won't be able to answer because I really don't know all that much... you know? But I could maybe do something about fonts and the graphics that I do for TTT. I'll think about it!
So I know SOME things about code - enough so that when I look at it I feel like I SHOULD understnad what's going on but not enough to know what to do/how to change things/how to fix things. Haha. My husband's a software engineer so I just pepper him with all my questions - he helped me set up my blog initially because I was trying to change a color of some headers or something... anywayy. then I decided I was annoyed with trying to tinker with code and just stopped. I haven't changed anything in my blog design since like, i first started. i just didn't want to spend the time doing it when I could be writing reviews or reading, you know? I'm always jealous of people with beautiful blogs but then I'm like eh, mine's not UGLY. So I don't do anything haha.
ReplyDeleteOoh that's awesome that your husband can help you! Mine's really good with computers, but not code and stuff like that. Yeah, that's kind of where I'm at. I just changed a few things and I know it's not the prettiest blog around, but I think it looks good and like you, I'd rather have more time to read!
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