Joeyanne Libraryanne blog redesign

A couple of years ago I bought a domain name for my girlfriend Joanne, my nickname for her is Joeyanne so I bought her www.joeyanne.co.uk which she was pleased with. She built a little web site about her which contained her CV on as she was looking for a job at the time. After a while she got into blogging and in June 2007 we installed a copy of WordPress onto her site she could blog away to her hearts content about her profession of librarianship, to make it unique she downloaded a theme on which we put a picture of some books and that was that.

After regularly adding good articles to her site its popularity grew and it became listed in the CILIP (Chartered Institute of Librarianship Professionals) newsletter. We recently analysed the statistics and found she was getting a regular 1500 visits a week. Of course getting lots of hits on your web site suddenly makes you self conscious, and you then want to look good, and when your boyfriend designs web sites for a living you can see where this is going.

Joey put together a very good brief consisting of sites, graphics and layouts she liked, she specified the font and the colours she wanted and handed it to me. The only issue we was she didn’t have any graphics to work from. The challenge for me was to scour the net for good free resources we could use.

Her brief requested a simple, easy to read, two column layout so my core focus was making the actual blog entries easy to read, after all these are the stars of the show. I worked around a centre aligned 900px wide layout.

She also likes icons so I went through my library and picked out the ones I felt worked best, I then modified these to fit in with her new theme.

While I was searching I stumbled upon a lovely bit of penguin clip art, Joey loves penguins so this made the perfect header image.

Another key element was the promotion of her RSS feed which broadcasts her latest posts to subscribers.  Joey has configured her blog to send out new items via email so I made up a little icon for this showing the RSS icon inside an envelope.

All that was left to do was to make a WordPress template from it which was a bit of a learning curve for me but once I knew all the code WordPress needed it didn’t take long to get her site up and running.

Joey is really pleased with the design and it has given her a new found confidence to promote the site even more and the feedback she’s had has been great. I think the ultimate compliment for me was when she explained she needed to move a couple of things around in the layout and was impressed with how clean the code was. I also made her a favicon and an ipod logo.