The new theme is up! And ok, there are still a few small changes to be made, but quite frankly I’m sick of looking at Blossom for the moment. What should have been a simple switchover and some CSS styling turned into a struggle against Twenty Eleven when I activated the theme well over a week ago. Despite me thinking that it would be a smooth transition (and considering the amount of time I spent on checking, adding and editing code before making it live it SHOULD have been), it was just a mess. I’ve been working on coding a lot more with Joe recently, and whilst I used to be a hardcore WordPress fan because it just works, and does everything I want without too much hassle, I’m coming to the conclusion that some people reached forever ago – that WordPress is just getting way, way too bloated. There is SO much crap in Twenty Eleven that’s just completely unnecessary and makes it stupidly time-consuming to style and edit. I hate to think what Twenty Twelve will be like *shudder twitch*
The outcome was that by Sunday afternoon, I decided to redo the entire theme based on Twenty Ten instead. I really didn’t want to do it, but it’s a lot easier to work with and a lot less bloated (there’s still completely useless code still in there that I must remember to strip out at some point, but on the whole it’s a lot better). I had originally planned to work on the content and add lots of pages over the weekend, but those plans have had to be put on hold for a bit. So you’ll notice that a couple of sections are a bit thin on the ground right now and/or are in desperate need of updating. But I just had to get Blossom live again, so there will be more content in the next few weeks.
By Sunday night I was still struggling with the code and decided to have a break…a day or two later I ended up back at square one as I realised the site had been hacked. To cut a long story short, we ended up having to back up everything, delete it, and install WordPress fresh. This took a LONG time because Blossom has hundreds of pages and the database and everything needed to be completely redone…not to mention 40+ plugins, most of which needed to be configured. Anyway, thanks to Joe, I finally got it sorted and re-did the layout for the third time. And here it is!
Whistle-stop tour of the new theme:
Front Page
All posts are going to be categorised under ‘Jenni’ or ‘Web’, so you can read what you’re interested in and I can write what I’m interested in at any given moment. I mentioned a while back that I want this blog to shift towards a more practical focus in terms of advice and thoughts around blogging, SEO, social media, design, development and so on, but I realise that a lot of my current visitors come here to read a personal blog – not surprising since that’s what Blossom.nu has been since I bought it in 2005. So I thought that the best solution was to divide the front page up (entries relating to Blossom.nu will mostly fall under ‘Jenni’ rather than ‘Web’). I did toy with a couple of other ideas, including starting a new site or using separate subdomains, but I already blog at too many websites and setting up subdomains would cause additional problems in terms of structure and navigation. I might add more categories to the front page in the future (my original plan was to have four, but then I realised I don’t blog enough for that).
Breadcrumbs
You can now see where you are and head back easily with new breadcrumb navigation on each subpage. Hopefully it will encourage people to explore the site more and learn how different sections fit together as well as making it easier to navigate around the site.
Archived Content
All the old things that people still visit are available in this section (the dollmakers, blinkie maker, Paint Shop Pro tutorials etc.). Most of these pages have been around for at least six years with some (not many) updates, but they aren’t getting deleted any time soon because they get a lot of visitors. I’m going to look into jQuerying everything up to bring it into the 21st century and make it more browser-friendly – that’s one of my lowest priorities, but hopefully I’ll get round to it at some point.
Pages
Blossom has gone from around 400 pages to under 200. I generally just trashed all the rubbish reads and outdated stuff (tips for Neopets circa 2003 or the original Sims game, anyone?). I’m going to be working on building more relevant content, as I mentioned above. This is going to be a long-term project depending on how much time I have free – I’ve already drafted quite a lot of pages and listed ideas for more, but they need styling work and images. I’m doing a lot of client work at the moment and that’s my first priority until at least New Year.
Still to complete
There’s still some styling left to finish, and I’m going to be slowly incorporating more ads into the site (you’ve probably spotted the Dreamhost image in the sidebar). I’ve been thinking carefully about this one because the last thing I want is for people to be put off or annoyed. They will be non-intrusive Adsense text ads, as seen on the Twitter plugboard, and they won’t even be on half the pages (I’m not sure about adding them to ‘Web’ posts yet). There won’t be any sponsored posts or anything like that, and there will be very few ads across the site in total. I’m also planning to add a couple of small Dreamhost banners in relevant spots. .nu names are really expensive, and my new rule is that all my sites have to earn at least their reg fee. Oh, and I’m offering sticky buttons on my plugboard for a small yearly cost.
My other ambition is to blog more regularly. I blog a LOT across a number of different sites – occasionally I’ll write five or six blog posts in the space of a few hours – but unfortunately never for Blossom. If I can increase the visitor numbers to something around what they used to be and get plenty more comments and feedback about what people want to see (hey, why not tick both boxes and leave a comment with suggestions at the end of this post?! 
) then that will motivate me more. Making something to cover the costs of my hosting will go a long way too – money is pretty motivational!
I think that pretty much sums it up, I’m not sure how long this theme is actually going to stick around for as I’m bored with it already and it just doesn’t give me that happy feeling that a good bit of design work does…on the other hand I’ve already spent more than enough time on this theme and I don’t really need a new one just yet…so we’ll see!
Thoughts on the new design/set up and comments about anything that’s broken or looks wrong are more than welcome!
Oh, and in case you didn’t see it on , I joined Formspring, so feel free to !
(Sorry this post is a bit rambling and so badly written, I’m extremely tired and I’ve got a bit of a fuzzy head at the moment! But at least the site is back, yay!)
*waves* Hi, I'm 
Hey Jenni,
It’s been such a long time since I left a comment on here – I’m not sure you even remember me… (A)
So, where to start… I think I just wanted to let you know that ever since I discovered Star Girl, which must have been around 2003/2004 (?) I have always read your blogs. I used to always leave a comment too, but I don’t know… When I found myself having less free time and quitting the webdesigning/blogging “scene” I kind of didn’t feel like commenting on blogs anymore. Which doesn’t take away the fact that I still enjoy reading your blogs very much, whatever they are about. I think the Web stuff you write about is very interesting – like I said, I quit the whole thing and don’t really know what’s going on in that world anymore, so it’s nice to read your blogs and keep a little up to date. As for the personal blogs, they’ve always been interesting. I wish you’d blog more often, but I know it’s very hard. I would love to create a new website and blog, but I just don’t have the time! Or at least, I’m not willing to take the time and do it, actually. At least I know I’ll try to leave a comment on every blog from now on.
As for your new theme: I really like it! I must say that the previous one was nice, but I love the colours of this new one. It’s very festive and reminds me of the fireworks for New Year’s Eve with all the round patterns.
xxx
Your new theme is just lovely and everything appears in place, so looks like all the work you did paid off.
I love this new layout! Just like Julie above me said, it’s a job well done, even with the long hours you spent on it. I like the changes that you’ve made, and never realized that you had so many pages on this site!
I used WordPress back in 2006-2007 and it was quite different back then. Many of the features that exist now, I don’t use much and don’t need – like the image uploader and the post types. The developers have been catering towards a less technical audience who may not want to get dirty with HTML, PHP, and CSS to have a custom theme on their sites. I can understand that direction, but that inevitably makes WordPress more bloated simply because it requires a lot more features and because everyone in that pool wants a different set of features.
I actually quite like Twentyeleven as a theme, but have never tried to make a child theme from it. To me, they tried to make Twentyeleven do everything a WordPress theme possibly could. For the average user who’s just adding a few widgets and a custom header, Twentyeleven is great. But I’ve seen the code for Twentyeleven and it’s a badly-commented mess. Probably just easier to make your own theme from scratch instead of trying to make a child theme.
I REALLY love the new layout, Jenni!! The colors really blend well together!!!
Sorry that you spent soo much time getting this up, as well as all of the other problems you’ve had along the way… 
But I guess it paid off because it looks REALLY good, better than what I can do!
Ah I think I pressed enter before I finish writing the comment, or did it even submit? Either way the page reloaded!
Incase it didn’t get submitted, I said something like
“Well done on getting the layout up, it looks great.
I haven’t even looked at Twenty Eleven, it looks too complicated for my liking. I prefer to code my own layout, it’s more flexible that way.
Talking about blogging more, I need to do the same, but I’ve said that many time and haven’t blogged more!”
Anyways, I wanted to say that I will write a separate blog entry regarding your question: “how do you feel confident enough about your skills to make the leap into applying for jobs? Or would you suggest the freelance route?”
It’s actually given me a great idea for a post. Thanks
The new theme is very nice
Although, I never saw the old one, I am sure this one is so much better! It sounds like it was a bit of a headache though. Yuck. Makes me glad I always make my themes from scratch. But this theme certainly proved to be worth the struggle 
Wow, such a lovely change! I understand how bloated WordPress is but I still love it. I code my themes on my own so there isn’t all that unnecessary stuff that’s in the themes made by WordPress… it’s so much easier. After I work on a layout for hours on end though, I do get tired of seeing it so I really don’t blame you, haha.
I’ve only had my domain since 2008, but I really want to keep it for a long time. I have opened up other blogs since then, but none of them have been as “active” as my current blog, and usually posts on those other blogs are random.
I have tried Textpattern, which is only a few kilobytes compared to WordPress’ 10 freaking megabytes. It is worth trying too, if you ever want to change. And I totally know what you mean about your website being huge. Mine has nearly 500 pages and posts and my backups can’t even be emailed to me anymore because they’re too big. xD