So, you may be noticing that things look very different around here!
Yes, its true. I changed up the site big time.
And yes, a mere month ago I just made the jump to redesign the site and the big move from Squarespace to WordPress.
So why a change so soon? Why a change at all?
Creating a new website is a big deal. Do I hire someone? Do I use a template? What is my visual branding? What should it look like? What energy will it give off? How will it be organized?
My priority in making this move to wordpress was to create a site that was more user friendly and easy to navigate. When I started doing e-courses and then more e-courses I just added pages onto my site and it felt so disorganized in terms of navigating it. Then Icreated another separate site. Then realized I really should only be attempting to manage one site at all!
I didn’t at all feel like I had enough of those above questions answered that I was ready to hire someone to create a site that I would feel at home in for years. I didn’t feel ready to invest thousands of dollars into a custom made site (though there are some incredible designers I have in mind if I want to make that move someday) so I went with a template from the company Prophoto.
ProPhoto and their incredible templates are based on WordPress. I can’t sing their praises enough. Their templates are breathtaking and they make it very user friendly to work with wordpress.
I jumped in, bought a template with them, then realized that that template simply didn’t work for me so I tried out one of their free templates which is what I ended up using. Even at this point I had learned so much about what I’m looking for in a site. I highly recommend playing around with the free template options of whatever company you work with as it can teach you so much about what you are looking for!
So the flowery site met many of my needs, felt like the whimsical part of me and my work, so I went for it.
I do indeed love that site, but for a few reasons have realized that it doesn’t let other parts of me have room. As my dear friend Liz has been saying to me lately “Yes, you are twirly skirts and pretty shoes, but you’re also skinny jeans and leather jackets”. As in, yes, I do want to let the whimsy have a place in my website but there is also so much of me who doesn’t really fit in with a flowery site like my last 2, the part that is urban and quirky.
As well, as a part of the Hello Soul Hello Business class I was one of four lucky participants to be able to have a mentor session with the teachers of the class Kelly Rae Roberts and Beth Nichols. Kelly Rae and Beth truly made me feel supported, encouraged and believed in during this session as well as giving me some wildly useful constructive criticism, mainly focused on how I can improve my website.
The great thing about constructive criticism is that you can either go for it or if it really feels like what you had to begin with was in alignment with your heart, you can stick with it.
After getting their feedback on the site, I really pondered it and much of it rang true.
So, once I got that feedback from Kelly Rae and Beth I was ready to just jump on it and change the entire site up. Yet I wanted to let it soak in. I wondered if it was too soon to make a change. And then, like the move from squarespace to wordpress, I kept on returning to the idea “Why Wait”?
What I’ve realized is that this lovely first site design is like a fabulous piece of clothing I found in a store. It fit, it worked and it made me smile.
But then I found another one, that not only worked, but felt like home, felt even more me.
So I’m switching it up!
I promise I won’t be switching it up every month but I’m glad I made the change (and you’ll see even more changes appear here in the coming month). I learned so much by creating that last site, so much so that I needed to move to a different one. Sometimes we have to make something that feels almost right in order to discover what feels totally right.
So take a peek around because things are a bit different here!