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Bakerella.com: a quick tour

Welcome to the new site design. This weekend I moved from my blogspot address to bakerella.com hosted through WordPress. I’ve been wanting to make the change for awhile, but I really loved blogger. It is right up my alley when it comes to ease of use. I just wish it offered as many options as WordPress so I would never have needed to leave. By the way, if you’re on Blogger now, you might want to stick around. They are doing some really great things as far as new features and functionality. I’ve got to tell you, they made it really difficult to leave. But, I had already ventured down the path of a new design and there was no looking back. I’m really excited about it. I hope you like the new look and to get you off to an easy start, I thought I would give you a really quick tour of some of the ways you can navigate to see older posts and search. I’m visual, so I have thumbnails everywhere I thought it would help. And … the other reason … the real reason … I didn’t bake this weekend because I was playing wannabe web designer getting all things ready to launch.

Note: graphics below are for illustration purposes. Clicking on them will not take you anywhere. Hey, somebody will ask. :)

Okay! Here goes:
sweetstuff
If you click on any of the three main categories located in top of the gray bar…

sweetstuff2
You will get a page that looks like this. These sections are like visual overviews of the most recent thumbnails related to each topic.
If you notice the topic, breakfast… the first thumbnail is the most recent breakfast post I have and the doughnuts are the oldest.
Obviously this section needs some attention. Note to self: bake more morning treats. This feature might actually be more for me than you. See, this way I keep track of what I’m baking and what I’m not baking enough of.
cupcakes
Moving on. In the same gray box above, if you click on any of the topics you’ll get a page that looks like this…

cupcakes2
These topic pages all have a main image and instead of all thumbnails, this view shows excerpts as well. You’ll find the most recent topic-related post at the top of each list and under the main image.

Except for this topic.
themes
Themes is slightly different.
christmas
Because so many of you guys ask for ideas, I wanted an easy way for you to look for things I have already made that may help out. On this topic page, the excerpts are also organized by most recent, but they are grouped by theme. Christmas, Halloween, Easter, For Her, etc.

That’s pretty much it for the main navigation, but you can also search through the archives.

Three different ways!
archives
The link is in the very top right hand section of the site. And it will allow you to search:
1. chronologically by year
2. most recent by list
3. most recent by photo thumbnails
archives3
YAY! Now I can actually find something I’m looking for. Before I only had archives by month that only listed the number of posts for that month. No post names and no thumbnails. I love this feature!
mostrecentphoto
And you can also access the most recent list and photo view quickly from the main navigation in the gray box. YAY!

Here’s even another fun way to look around.
random
At the bottom of each individual story post, there is section called Random Sweetness. This functions exactly like it’s name. All of the thumbnails rotate through randomly. Maybe something cute that you haven’t seen before will catch your eye. It does mine. I made everything, but I still can’t stop clicking on these thumbnails. I told you I was visual, but it seems easily distracted, too.

If you want to keep up with what’s coming next, you can subscribe by email or RSS.
subscribe

Note to current RSS subscribers:
I’m working on getting the feed back the way you are used to.
Note to readers using IE7: You may not be experiencing the site to it’s fullest. I hope this will be corrected soon.

There may be even more glitches that I’m not aware of yet, but I plan on working through any of the bugs that might arise from a transition like this.

So that’s it for the tour. I hope you like the site. I kinda feel like I’m just starting out and now I have a site that can meet everyone’s cravings… including my own.

I want to give the biggest thanks to Heather of OMSH.

I could absolutely not have done this transition and design without her help. She’s also the force behind the Pioneer Woman’s award-winning blog design and one of the sweetest people I’ve had the pleasure of working with. Thank you Heather! You rock!

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