Upgrading website!

Now that National Novel Writing Month and my Kickstarter are both done, I wanted to work a on new goal – to revamp my website!  I had looked around for a few weeks while procrastinating during my writing sessions and found a few awesome sites which offer free WordPress themes.  Well, there are actually hundreds of sites which offer free themes, but most of them look the same, quite frankly.  The premium stuff (fully set up site, video tutorials, tech support) is not free, it’s about $50 USD (depends on theme) which isn’t too bad.

WordPress has revolutionized the way websites are built as it’s really website building for dummies who don’t know code (aka – me!).  You install templates and you keep adding “widgets” to customize the site.  Widgets are all those things on the side of websites and at the bottom which display social media icons, posts, calenders, etc.

After a few months of building a basic WordPress website, I felt ready to set up a more complicated site. Of course, my Viking husband laments that I’m not coding much and things could be more beautiful, but I can live with using a standard theme.

These are the two sites I found which offered great free themes with nice designs and lots of widget options:

http://yithemes.com/
http://smthemes.com/

This website uses “Alium” from SM Themes.  My first choice was Memento from YI Themes, but the preview wasn’t working properly and the free one looked too limited. Second choice was Diablo (yes, like the game name), but the words on the demo site were too dark.

It was exciting to learn how to use sliders (the moving thing at the top of the site) as I always wondered how people did that!  The only thing I haven’t learned how to do is build a nice portfolio gallery with pop up words.  I found a few widgets for displaying pictures, but the problem with me is that I have too many words describing the artwork.  Oh well, I’ll figure out how to display things more nicely over time.

Let me know what you think of this new site!