A Look Back: It's a Book Life Through the Ages

Do you notice that my blog looks a little different? Or I guess I should say a LOT different?! Do you? This is how excited I am right now about the new look of my blog!

Okay, I think you get it.

For Christmas my husband gifted me with offering to pay for a professional designer to update the look of my blog for me. Since I have been doing this on my own since I first started this blog, almost three years ago, I was ecstatic. I am no designer and only know a little CSS and such so I could only do so much blog designing on my own. To celebrate I thought I would show you my three main past blogger headers so you could reminisce a little with me and see how awesome my blog has progressed through the ages. ;)

The Beginning

Here is my first attempt to design my own blog header.

I had no idea what I was doing at the time I made this and I think it turned out pretty good. After a while I got bored with this header and kind of wanted something that had a different feel to it. I was just ready to spice up my blog a bit and I was tired of looking at the same thing every day so I went ahead and gave the design thing another whirl.

The Middle

Here is the something fresh I came up with.

Not to shabby if I do say so myself. I was really enjoying this new look for a long while. Then I got bored again and when I took a second to look at the header a little closer I realized that the font wasn't doing anything for me. So I created my most recent header. (I took a fuller shot of my blog so you could also see my valiant effort at creating a cool background and side bar headings. Once again, I thought I did a pretty good job with such little experience.)

I loved the look of this one better even though it was really similar to my previous header. I thought it was super cute. I am pretty proud that I made all this myself, but after a while I realized that there really wasn't much else I could do on my own to give my blog a face lift. I was also looking for something a little more professional looking. I am kind of a very frugal person, and therefore I never thought I would spend money on having someone design my blog for me, but when my husband said he would buy me a blog redesign for Christmas as my gift... I was sold.

Out With the Old. In with the new.

MY NEW PRETTY.

Stephanie from These Paper Hearts was wonderful to work with and made my now current blog design. I asked for something fun, clean, and professional and I got just that. I freaking LOVE it.

I really think the images in the header are a great representation of my book life. I work at a library and have always used my local one since I was little hence the library card, the books are pretty self-explanatory items, I am always drinking coffee, I wear glasses, and the journal represents my writing.

Once again, a huge thank you to Stephanie!

I'm sorry to say that due to time restraints and her new job Stephanie is no longer creating new blog designs, but you can find a whole bunch of her awesome blogging tips and tricks and design help on her blog These Paper Hearts.

The Sites That Saved Me From Countless Blogging Disasters

Now that I have been blogging for almost two years I feel like I can officially give some helpful advice to my fellow book bloggers out there. I wrote this post not only to give you some helpful websites full of blogging tips and hints and other stuff, but I wrote it to also praise all those blogs and websites that without their help my blog would look like crap, and you probably wouldn't even be reading this right now. So here are some awesome blogs and other sites that really help me keep my blog looking fabulous and running smoothly.

** Please share with me some of your website secrets that keep your blog running and looking beautiful! I can use all the help I can get. :)

The Five Obvious Ones

1. Goodreads has been a life saver since I started blogging. I keep track of my To Be Read Pile using Goodreads which keeps me better organized than I ever have been with just a word document. I also love how I can announce to other readers and bloggers what I am currently reading and get to check out what they are currently reading as well. Not to mention Goodreads also has some giveaways you can enter to win some ARCs.

2. I never used Twitter before I started my blog. I just didn't get the point of it. Now I love it. It's not only a great way to share with the world what I post on my blog, but I get to interact with authors and a lot of them tweet back! It's awesome. Not to mention getting to talk with other bloggers and all the fun Twitter chats and events.

3. Once Google Reader was over I needed to find a new platform to not only follow new bookish blogs, but to organize and keep track of the blogs I was already following. Although Bloglovin has its annoying moments, such as when it says I still have unread posts, but they don't show, it has been good to me. It's easy to follow other blogs.

4. I'm not sure why, or I just don't remember why I chose Blogger to host my blog, but I did. It's free and it has been pretty easy to use. I know a lot of people prefer Wordpress, but since I haven't had any big problems with Blogger I'm just going to stick with it. One day I hope to actually have my own site, but I don't have the the money for that right now so my website will continue to have .blogspot at the end of it.

5. Google has been without a doubt the most helpful search engine ever whenever I would encounter a blogging crisis. Every time I need help with just about anything book or blog related I just Google it and most of the time I find what I need.

The Five Sites That Make My Blog Pretty

1. PicMonkey is a similar type of program like Photoshop, but it is free! It takes a little while to discover all of the interesting things you can do with this program, but it is totally worth your time. I like using the site to make collages among other things. I made my blog header using this site along with all of my side bar headers.

2. I stumbled upon A Universe Behind Your Eyelids a long time ago when I was in search of a way to put boxes around text. I really needed to spruce up how my reviews looked on my blog. This site didn't just give me a tutorial, it has a text box creator. Every single time you see a text box on my blog I made it using this site. You can change the color of the box, the color of the border, all of that fun stuff. I know many of you probably just use the code to make boxes on your site, but for some reason I just always found this way to be easier for me.

3. My favorite post from the Code it Pretty blog is the one that taught me own to use different/unique blog fonts from google fonts and how to put them on my blog. It was an easy to follow tutorial. Hence my recently new font for my reviews. There are other helpful tutorials on Code it Pretty along with other website suggestions for your blogging needs.

4. The wonderful site LinkWithin gave me what I found to be the easiest way to add a related posts widget on my blog that shows up at the end of each post.

5. Giphy is pretty much my go to site for whenever I want to use entertaining gifs in my discussion posts. I tried using Google to find gifs at first but that was too much of a pain. It's so much easier to use Giphy. How do you find gifs?

Two Of My Favorite Book Blogs That Offer Great Blogging Advice

1. Parajunkee gives its readers some of the best book blogging advice that I have ever come across so far while blogging. The best is that a lot of her advice is aimed directly at book bloggers not just general advice for any old blogs. Her feature is called Book Blogging 101. 

2. The Caffeinated Book Reviewer is another of my favorite book blogs that offers some great blogger tips and tricks.