Five Tips for Redesigning Your Site to Be Awesome + Giveaway

Redesigning your blog can be both fun and potentially stressful. Thankfully, you have us to give you some not-so-serious-and-non-surefire tips for success and our awesome designer to offer an even more awesome giveaway.

1. Choose blogging platform

You need to choose what kind of platform is going to work out best for you.  Whether that’s branding your posts on the hide of a dead donkey, writing in milk or crop circles.  What’s best for your lifestyle and method of posting?  A hundred carrier pigeons spelling out your words in the sky?  I hear peeing in the snow is very economical though frustratingly seasonal.  Sewing your reviews onto 18th century tapestries is cool but takes a lot of time.  But I totally hear this WordPress, Blogger and self-hosted blog things are a good idea.  And if all that fails, there’s always tumblr!

2. Decide on a theme you love

What’s important is that it feels like home for you.  So that may be a pastiche background of Channing Tatum’s abs, or a million billion lovehearts to show how much you love every single person who clicks on your site, go with it.  Don’t ever change, my friend.  Another option is just going with white.  This is what Steph and I did because it shows the blankness of our personality (If that were the case, we should have went with black. Matches my soul. -Steph).  Also, we abhor picking a colour because we do not agree on any colours!  So if you and your cobloggers or multiple personalities are having problems picking a colour – there is a whole range of white for you.  No really.  So much white.  Actually, now that I about it, Steph hates my obsession with white.  Hmmm…

Also a good point is to make sure you and your cobloggers are all happy with the colour decisions.  And you can go here.  They have lots of gorgeous colours that your coblogger will love and you’ll refuse to let her use (I’m sorry, what were we talking about again? I’m still stuck on “Channing Tatum’s abs”. -Steph).

3. Pick a designer

It may seem like you can just go throwing colour nilly willy on your site, but it turns out it’s a lot more difficult than that.  You have to first find a designer you like, then you have to tell them what shit they have to do.  I thought the conversation would go like this:

Me: Hey!  Design my site.

Designer: Sure.  Gimme money and here’s your site!  Come back again soon!

But it doesn’t work like that.  However, you can always design your site the lazy way by throwing a bunch of almost meaningless buzz words at her and yelling at her when she doesn’t do everything exactly as you want it.  Buzz words I would suggest are: Modern, colourful, bright, open, detailed, eye-catching, fresh, and stylistic.

4. Punch blogging rules in the face

Does it matter if your Channing Tatum abs background is causing all your buttons to break? No!  Just do it anyway! It is also not that important if people can navigate your blog.  At least not nearly as important as them opening your site and going, “Hmmm, I hope those taste as good as they look!”

Who cares what anyone else thinks?  Or if your text is in comic sans, or even Wingdings.  You’re paying for it so be happy with it!

5. Enter this giveaway for a free header!

So Kat and I completely lucked out with finding our designer Tawni from Forever Design Studio. We were immediately drawn to her artwork and ability to create such unique blogs. In retrospect, choosing Tawni as our designer was almost the only thing we agreed on in the entire process. And somehow she patiently put up with our bullshit, last-minute changes, took our jumbled ideas and turned it into the Cuddlebuggery you see today. Basically, she’s a rock star.

Now for the giveaway! There will be 6 winners total!

5 winners will get a custom header design (WordPress or Blogger) for only $20, usually $75. 1 lucky winner will receive a totally FREE custom header!

The customer header can be a combination of the following:

• Header + Background
• Header + a set of custom network buttons
• Header + one other element

Contest Rules:

• To enter, please fill out the Raffelcopter form below.
• We ask that all entrants be at least 13 years or older to enter.
• Winners will be announced here and they will be emailed. Please check your email because we are only giving the winner 48 hours to respond. Otherwise someone else will have to be selected.
• Please enter your email address in the Rafflecopter form and not the comments.
• Also, please understand that we reserve the right to disqualify any entries we find gaming the system. Cheaters never prosper.

a Rafflecopter giveaway