I just finished working with Nicole of Running While Mommy, and she was a blast! I helped her do a make-over of her running blog, which she runs through Blogger. Here’s the “before” screenshot (note the generic header and stock image background):

And now…drum roll please….

Nicole told me she loved purple, and since she lives near the beach, she wanted some sort of “beachie-ness” incorporated into her blog. So, purple it was. Beach too. I also gave her a header that would always be relevant – she could switch out the photos for more recent ones whenever she wanted.

Nicole was super happy with the end product, and was excited for her readers to see it. She said, “You did a fabulous job and I would absolutely recommend you to friends.  Thanks for all your help and patience!” You are quite welcome Nicole, it was my pleasure.

If you’d like to spruce up or blog or do a complete renovation, I’d love to help. You can check out my specially made blogging packages here, or contact me here.

I love color, don’t you? My bedroom is painted a deep green color, and my favorite color is a cranberry-ish pink. My car is a greyish “celestial blue” with a bit of metallic in it. All very wonderful colors, if I do say so myself!

But what is even more fun than single colors? A full color palette! Here’s the color palette for this site:

If that’s not cheery, then I don’t know what is!

There’s tons of color theory behind picking color palette, but for today, I just want to lay back and enjoy some of my favorite color palettes. Well, current favorites. I’m not very loyal when it comes to colors!

As you can see, I’m personally drawn more toward warm colors than cooler ones.

And what about some famous color palettes? Here are some color themes from famous paintings:

(All palettes via Design Shack)

I’ll go into more detail on color and color theory at another time (it’s interesting, I swear!), but for today I just wanted to throw some color into the world.

What’s your favorite color combination? Let everyone know in the comments below!

Last week I shared some of the info I learned about SEO (search engine optimization) from a blogging conference I went to last month. Today I have another little SEO tidbit for you, and I like to call it:

A Picture is Worth A Thousand Words

We all agree that images in blog posts are good, right? Right. No one wants to read big blocks of copy without any rest for their eyes, at least not in blog posts, anyway! So, having good images makes your readers happy. Well, having good images can also help with SEO. If you do it right, that is!

[You can read the rest of this post on Penelope Says, my techie site with lots of totally useful blogging and WordPress info]

As you know, I do custom blog and web design for clients. I can help you with any size project, from some simple social media icons that coordinate with your site to a full blown, built from scratch website. It’s awesome – my clients have fun, I have fun, and everyone leaves happy.

Well, today I’m unveiling a brand new offering that I’m really excited about. It’s perfect for all you artsy DIYers, designing women, and fashionistas. Here’s the deal:

You design it, I code it.

Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

You go to town in Photoshop designing your fantasy website or blog, complete with colors, graphics, menus, backgrounds, social media icons, font, the works! Then, beam me the .psd file, and I’ll implement it on your site. It’s as simple as that. Your recipe, my cooking, if you will.

You can be fancy and intricate or minimalist and bare. Be reserved and understated, or full on color-me-crazy, it’s completely up to you. If you can put it together, I can probably pull it off. If you’re interested in featuring your own design on your blog or site, I’d love to work with you!

Prices start at an easy-to-handle $100 and will vary depending on the complexity of the design. You can contact me for more details – I can’t wait to hear from all you lovely artists out there!

And of course, if you’re sure of everything in the world except what colors to put on your blog, I’d love to hear from you too. All are welcome ’round these parts.

I had the pleasure of going to FitBloggin 2 weeks ago and have come back with a bunch of things I want to fill you guys in on! I’ll start the party with some search engine optimization (SEO) tips I learned from Brandi of Diets in Review.

As blog writers, you all know that if a reader can’t find you well, then, they won’t be able to read your blog! And how do readers find you? Yes, many of your readers may come from blog hops — formal or informal — or other such organic means. But you also get a few readers from simple Google searches. Wouldn’t it be great to get just a few more?

[You can read the rest of this post on Penelope Says, my techie site with lots of totally useful blogging and WordPress info]

**This is the third in a three part series on working with a blog designer. You can read the first two parts here and here**

Previously in “Working with a Blog Designer”…(imagine that spoken in a deep voice, like in the intro to Lost)

In the first two parts of this series I walked you through sketching out your dream blog and the actual task of finding a blog designer. In this final part, let’s get our designing on!

Working with a Blog Designer
Part 3: The Final Product

So you’ve found your designer and you’re ready to get going. Here’s how the actual design process works, at least from a client’s point of view!

A. The Questionnaire

In order for your designer to get started customizing your site, you have to point her in the right direction. You could just say “make it awesome”, but that never really works for anyone, as you might imagine. So, how does the designer know what you want? You have to tell her!  I usually go about this in one of two way: either over the phone or via written questionnaire.

If it’s just a small, simple blog without too many customizations, I’ll simply chat on the phone with my client for a while, having her tell me what she’s looking for. That way I can tease out whatever info I need on the spot and can going right away.

If it’s a larger project though, I’ll have my client fill out an actual questionnaire. Sorry kids, it’s time for more homework! But don’t worry – it’s not that scary or intimidating. I ask 13 questions that are designed to give me a great understanding of what you are looking for. Here’s some sample questions:

• What are 3 things you like about your current blog design?
• What are 3 things you don’t like about your current blog design?
• What are 3 adjectives you want to come to mind when people first see your blog?
• Make a Pinterest board or Polyvore collage that portrays the overall feeling you want for your site <–You already did that, back in Part 1, so you’re ahead of the game!!

There questions ask for both specific items and general ideas. As a general rule, the more information you can give, the better. A response of “I like the way this site has customized social media icons that match the colors tie into other graphics on her site” is a lot more helpful than “The social media icons are nice.” Similarly, “I don’t like the way the loud background of my site distracts my readers from my content” is more helpful than “my background is ugly.” You get the idea.

The designer will also need a list of concrete must haves for your site, such as:

• Contact form
• Recipe plugin
• Link to Etsy store
• Opt-in form to collect email addresses

There’s a good chance you already discussed most of this on your initial phone call with the designer, but it’s good to go over the list again making sure you add in everything you would like. Definitely refer back to the “best blog” brainstorming you did in Part 1.

B. The Initial Draft

After you hand over your questionnaire, the designer will do her magic. There’s no actual fairy dust involved, but hey, I like the idea of a bit of magic happening!

When the designer is ready for you to take your first look at your new and awesomized blog, she’ll get in touch with you. She’ll let you know where you can see see it, usually either on a test site of hers, a sub-domain of your own site, or simply on your normal domain if you’re starting from scratch. She may simply give you screenshots, but I always think a live site is nice.

Once you have access to your site, take a look around. Check everything out: layout, fonts, graphics, anything the designer was working on. As your doing this, take some notes: what did you like, what would you like changed. Notes are good, and as with the questionnaire, specific notes are even better.

When you’ve reviewed your new design, it’s time for the back and forth “tweaking” of things. Your designer probably told you how many revisions were included in her price, so keep that in mind. As I said above, make a list of all the things you liked and didn’t like. Sure, the designer technically only needs to know about things you would like changed, but it’s also nice to hear what the client likes about the new design — we are only human after all!

Go over your list of notes with the designer. She should be amenable to everything, as long as it falls within the scope of your original agreement. Here’s some examples.

“Acceptable” Requests/Changes:

• Change the font of the post titles to something less “scripty” and make them a bit bigger
• Move the social media icons from above my about me blurb on the homepage to below it
• Move the navigation menu below the header and make the menu tabs more rounded to look more like buttons

Requests/Changes that are probably outside the scope of your agreement:

• Please add a custom coded slide show of all the photos of my dog that have ever been posted on my site
• I’ve changed the focus of my blog. Please redo the entire site so it is a goth metal music review site instead of a DIY craft blog.
• and other such things!

C. The Final Launch

Once you’ve done the comment/revise/comment revise thing a few times, your site should be ready to launch. Oh what a happy day! Everything should be made live, whether that means taking your current site out of maintenance mode or moving the site from a test domain to your domain. Once the site is live, click through it and make sure everything works. The designer should have tested the site before she launched it, but again, we’re only human, and may have missed a font change on the bottom of your About Me page, or something like that.

And then? Feel free to shout to the rooftops that you new site has arrived!

Well, that pretty much wraps up everything. You should now be fully equipped to work with a designer to make you site look as awesome as you know it can. If you would like some help with the design of your blog, or simply have questions, I’d love to hear from you — you can contact me here.

**This is the second in a three part series on working with a blog designer. You can read the first part here!**

So you’ve had some fun trolling through Pinterest to help solidify the the look and feel of your site, and you’ve written down the necessary parts of your “dream blog”. What’s next? Well, now we move from looking inward to looking outward. That’s right — the actual process of finding and hiring a blog designer.

Working with a Blog Designer
Part 2: The Hunt

Now, this is of course an obvious statement, but in order to work with a designer, you actually have to find a designer, preferably one who is a pleasure to work with and has good design sense and coding skills. So, let’s start with the basics and move on from there.

A. What’s Your Budget?

Aaahhh, the budget question. Things involving money are always a bit touchy. But, unless your designer is your best friend and she owes you a favor, you’re going to have to pay at least something in exchange for a blog makeover. So, first things first: decide on your budget.

People have different budgets and that’s okay. Someone who is just starting out may not want to invest hundreds of dollars into a blog that she’s not sure she’ll stick with. However, someone else may wish to celebrate their 500th (or 1,000th or 10,000th) follower with a full blog makeover and is willing and capable of spending $1,000 or more. It’s completely up to you to decide, and both blogs can look lovely. All I’m saying is: have a budget in mind so you don’t end up shopping at Prada when Target is more your speed.

B. Revisit Your Bookmarked Sites

In Part 1 of this series I suggested you bookmark a few sites that you were visually drawn to. Go back to those sites and try to figure out if the site was professionally designed. Most designers will leave little calling card link at the bottom of the sites they design. It should be easy to spot if you’re looking for it. If there’s a link, great – head on over and check out the designer; you may have hit gold on your first try. If you can’t find a link, feel free to contact the owner of the site. If it turns out she designed the site herself, she’ll feel awesome that you thought it was done by a professional. If she hired someone, well, there you go — you have your first lead!

C. Referrals, Referrals, Referrals

Sometimes finding a good blog designer is like finding a good hair dresser or pediatrician: referrals from friends go a long way. So, put it out into the universe that you’re looking for a designer: ask your bloggy friends, post on your Facebook page, send out a few tweets. Ask if anyone has a designer she recommends. People are usually quite happy when asked to give their opinion on something, and hiring blog designers is no exception!

D. Blog Designer Networks

If you haven’t come up with a few names by trolling sites you like or asking your bloggy friends, blog designer networks can help. Blog designer networks are kind of like the yellow pages of designers: a whole big list of designers all collected in one spot. Some examples are the aptly named Blog Designer Network, or the blog designer directory at Blogaholic. These may be a bit overwhelming with their long lists of designers, but stick with it – there are some great designers out there, including yours truly, of course!

E. The Initial Contact

Once you’ve found a designer you think you might like to work with, whether it’s because her style matches your vision for your site, or she’s a referral from your Twitter friends, you obviously have to get in touch with her! Usually a short email is just fine, something along the lines of “I’m looking to work with a designer to revamp/tweak/completely overhaul my blog. I liked your portfolio and would like to chat with you about your services.” That really is sufficient for the first touch. If you want to add more details, that’s fine, maybe a list of things you’d like (ex: custom header, background, menu, etc) or if you were referred by someone.

The designer should get back to you quickly, this is her business, after all! At this point with potential clients, I usually suggest a quick phone call. That way I can get a better idea of their project and the potential client can check me out as well. Good questions to ask the designer in the initial phone call are:

• What’s your turnaround time?
• What is included in your services (ex: premium themes, custom artwork)
• Who owns any custom artwork created for your site? (For example: if a designer makes a logo for you, who will own the image? She may keep the rights to it and give you permission to use it, or once created it might belong solely to you, to do with what you will.)
• What’s her fee structure? You’re not asking for a firm quote at the moment, but how she works her payments. Does she charge by the hour, or a flat fee per project? Is there an initial deposit? Is payment in full expected up front? That kind of thing.

Then, it’s time for the designer to ask you some questions, such as:

• Your over all vision for your site. Forwarding her your Pinterest board or Polyvore collage can help a lot.
• What specific design elements you are looking for, for example, you may want a custom header, background, and blog button, but you’re happy with “off the rack” social media icons.
• Other non-design elements you want incorporated into your blog — basically the list of must haves you came up with in Part 1.

F. The Quote

Now it’s time to get down to brass tacks. After your phone call with the designer, it’s time for a quote. Here, the more specific each party can get, the better. It protects both you and the designer. Here are some specifics that should most likely be addressed in a quote:

• What design elements are included in the quote, for example: custom header, background, menu bar, favicon, and post signature
• Other things included (or not included!) in the quote: premium themes, stock art licenses, Blogger to WordPress migrations, etc
• How many revisions are included, for example: two rounds of revisions with a third one week after delivery
• A delivery time frame
• And obviously, the price, whether it’s is a flat fee, an hourly charge, or an hourly charge with a max out amount.

Once the designer gives you the quote, it’s absolutely okay to ask questions and make clarifications. It’s best for both sides to have a clear understanding of the agreement that’s been put forth. From there, it’s up to you! If you didn’t hit it off with the designer, if the quote wasn’t something you are comfortable with, or whatever, no worries, the only thing you’ve lost is a phone call. If everything sounds peachy and you’d like to move forward, then skippy-hooray, you’ve found yourself a designer!

The next part of the series (watch for it next week!) goes into detail on actually working with the designer to get the blog of your dreams.

If you’re all ready to start working with a designer, I’d love to chat with you (and  answer all the questions above, of course!). You can contact me here.

Yup, you read that right. The Pink Peacock Studio website is 300% green. Let me explain.

My site is hosted at Green Geeks, a green web hosting company. How are they green? Well, the world wide web doesn’t run on love and peace and harmony, unfortunately. The world wide web is run on computers. Well, servers if you want to get specific about it. Servers that require tremendous amounts of electricity to run. Like, tremendous amounts. According to CNN, it takes more electricity to power our country’s internet usage that it does to make all the cars and truck produced in the US. That’s a lot of electricity.

So how does Green Geeks play into all of this? Well, they, like any other web hosting company, require energy to run and cool their servers. They pull the energy they need from the traditional electric grid, but on the flip side, they purchase wind energy credits to offset their energy use. They don’t even simply replace the energy they use, they go above and beyond by purchasing enough energy credits to replace the electricity they use 3 times over. Boo ya for them!

The wind credits are the big thing Green Geeks does, but they do smaller things as well, such as running their servers as efficiently as possible, allowing employees to telecommute, and using auto lights in their offices. They’re just an all around green company.

Oh, and they also have all the things you would expect from a web hosting company: 99.9% uptime, 24/7/365 tech support (super helpful by the way – I’ve a few instant message chats with them!), unlimited domains, unlimited storage, yadda yadda yadda.

But really, I just like saying my site is wind powered. I picture myself on a big hilltop somewhere doing a Julie Andrews impression while some turbines in the distance turn out all kinds of super awesome green energy. And it makes me happy.

You can check out Green Geeks here, and be sure to come back on Thursday for part 2 of my Working with a Blog Designer series!

* The Green Geeks links are affiliate links, but rest assured, I use Green Geeks myself and fully stand behind their service

So you’ve been blogging a while, and up until now your out-of-the-box theme has been working well enough for you. But you’re having fun and gaining followers (in that order, which is very important!) and would like your blog design to better reflect your personality and what your blog is all about. Maybe you’re too busy to make the changes on your own, don’t know how, or would just rather have someone else do it. Regardless of how you reached the decision, you’ve decided:

You’d like to hire a blog designer.

Congratulations! You’re on the path to a blog that will reflect you as well visually as it does with your written content. Where do you go from here though? Aaaahhh, that’s a good question. Thankfully, I’ve got some help for you — help in the form of a three part series that walks you through working with a blog designer. We’ll start with steps to take before you even start actually the search for a designer, and end with when your new and improved blog is launched for the world to see. Let’s get started, shall we?

Working with a Blog Designer
Part 1: The Warm Up

Before you even start looking for a blog designer to help you with your blog, it helps to do a bit of groundwork first. This will not not only help narrow your search for a designer (when we get to that part), but also helps you, the blogger, clarify what you’re looking for and in what direction you want to travel.

A. Dream up your “Best Blog”

What are your dreams for your blog? What do you want your blog to accomplish? These are important questions to consider. You’ll want to have an idea of what you’re looking for before you go searching for a designer. Think about your blog “must haves”, and jot those down. Some examples:

• If your blog features your photography, you’ll probably want a photo gallery page on which to feature your portfolio
• Say you’re a crafter and you have an Etsy shop — maybe you would like to prominently feature your Etsy listings
• If your posts involve a lot of text, you’ll want a clean and easy to read blog, which means no fancy fonts or crazy text colors
• Are you a social media maven (and really, who isn’t these days!)? Well, then you’ll probably want to have your social media icons front and center
• And so on.

B. Pinterest or Polyvore – take your pick!

Now for the fun part! Now is when you get to start the actual design process. (Yup, the design process starts before you even start looking for a designer!) Start a new Pinterest board or Polyvore collage, and start pinning away. What are  you pinning? Well, anything that represents what you want your new blog to look like. Now is not the time to be too literal. If you’re planning on blogging about premium cupcakes, you shouldn’t just fill your board with pictures of cupcakes. Instead, you want your board to portray the look and feel of your blog. And you don’t even have to just pin pictures. Words work well too! Anything that, when you look at it, makes you think of your blog, Pin it, Baby!

Here’s two examples I put together. One is a Pinterest board I put together today, just for this blog post. (Can I just say that I love my job? I get to make Pinterest boards while on the clock!) The other is a Polyvore collage a made for a personal blog.

Those should give you a good idea of what you’re trying to achieve. The more pins to put on your board or images on on your collage, the better — the finished piece helps both you and your future designer picture what you would like your blog to look like.

C. Do Some Blog Hopping

Whee – another fun activity! Spend a bit of time — an hour or an entire weekend, it’s up to you — bouncing around the blogosphere looking for blogs that catch your eye. The subject matter doesn’t play into this step, today we’re all about the look of the sites. Bookmark a handful of sites that you like the look of. In this case a “handful” is at least three, six or  seven is better. Don’t get too carried away though, try limit yourself to only the blogs you like the best. It’s easy to get bookmarking happy and start tagging everything, so some restraint is good. These bookmarks gives you — and your future designer — one more thing to glean your site design from.

That’s it for right now. (I think that’s enough homework for one day, don’t you?) In the next part of the series we’ll get down to actually finding and hiring a web designer. Look for this second installment next week. In the meantime, if you’re rip-raring to go on getting a new blog design for yourself, I’d love to chat! You can contact me here.

Facebook. What would we do without it? Other than perhaps be productive with our downtime and not get jealous of our rich friends who can afford to go on vacations to Bora Bora. But let’s face it, like all things, Facebook has its little things that annoy us. Like when you post a link to a newly published blog post and the image that comes up to use as a thumbnail has absolutely nothing to do with your post. Well, maybe not absolutely nothing, but it certainly isn’t what you would choose. Like this one:

In context it works, but really? To the potential reader, what do bowls of pumpkin custard have to do with avoiding Pinterest overwhelm? Nothing. Wouldn’t it be great to have a default thumbnail image for your blog as a backup in case the images Facebook would normally offer you aren’t cutting it? Yes, yes it would be great. And fortunately, I’ve come up with a nifty little way of doing just this!

Here’s how it works:

• Create or find an image you would like to have as a backup thumbnail for your blog. Ideally it should be about squarish in shape, i.e. not super long and skinny or tall and skinny, but squarish. You probably want to make it relevant to your blog or site, perhaps your logo, or something like that. But, that part is up to you.
• Upload your image. If you use WordPress you can upload it to your Media Library. If you use Blogger, uploading to a Picasa Web Album would work well. Note the URL of the image.
• Create a new sidebar widget (gadget if you’re using Blogger). It should be of the HTML/text variety. Make sure to drag it to the bottom of your sidebar. This is important!

• Type in this code, making sure to use the actual URL of your image:

[code type="html"]

[/code]

That’s it! Easy huh?

Here’s a brief explanation of what’s going on: You added your fallback thumbnail image to your sidebar. Then, instead of having the image show up in your sidebar, we hid it from view.  But, Facebook still sees it! When it trolls the page for a thumbnail image, it will pick up on the one you uploaded specifically for this purpose! That way, your image will always be available as one the thumbnail image choices. Your fallback image may not have anything to do with the specific post you are sharing on Facebook, but at least the image will be representative of your blog in general.

Much better!

Lastly: I mentioned above that the fallback image widget should always be at the bottom of your sidebar widgets. This is because while the fallback image isn’t visible on the page, it is still techically there, taking up room. So, if you put another widget below it, it would look like there was a big empty space in your sidebar — not cool. If you always have it at the bottom though, it’s all good.

Nifty huh? Now there’s one less thing in the world to be annoyed about!