Blogging, Family travel

My blog makeover on a budget

July 21, 2015 32 Comments

You may have noticed that Tin Box Traveller is looking a little less green tomato and a bit more mustard seed. Don’t worry. Tin Box Tot hasn’t been making a mess going through my cupboards again. We’ve had a makeover!


This project has been on my 2015 blogging bucket list for some time. When July came round and I’d still not done more than spend a few moments thinking about blog headers and colour schemes, I decided to give myself a kick up the butt.

I’d love to have done a ‘bells and whistles’ redesign but while I’m on maternity leave that will have to wait. So what you see before you is a blog makeover on a budget. A £1.99 budget to be exact.

Here’s how I did it:

Preparation

I read a lot of advice from other bloggers about how to redesign your blog. I found the Blog Club posts from Abi at You Baby Me Mummy a great help.

The look I was after was vintage travel, sunny, light and airy. That’s about all I managed to jot down in between nappy changes and Tin Box Baby’s three-hour feeding cycle.

Next I started trawling Etsy looking for designs to match. I originally thought I might buy a pre-designed logo. But then I found some really cute hand drawn caravan clip art that I knew would be perfect for my blog.  

This set of 25 hand drawn vintage caravans by SurfaceHug was my only out of pocket expense: £1.99. Money well spent!

Design

I set about designing my blog logo using the Design function on Pic Monkey. I made up different draft versions using the clip art. 


Once I had found the design I liked best I took a note of the colours, fonts and font sizes that I’d used. I then used this information to create a Facebook cover, Twitter cover, business cards, favicon, and social media avatar.



I probably should have decided on the colour scheme for the rest of my blog before this point but it seemed to fit well with the look I was trying to achieve.

The techy side 

Tin Box Traveller is hosted on Blogger which allows you to customise your blog template. I managed to change the template to a blank canvas, add the new header, set a matching background, rearrange my sidebar and footer, and coordinate my menu, links and text with my new colour scheme in one evening. I also uploaded the new covers to Facebook and Twitter.

It’s by no means perfect but I feel a little bit happier in my new blogging skin. Like I mentioned, I would like to do more and may make some other changes, particularly to the blog template, in the not too distant future.

What do you think? Have you done your own budget blog makeover?

I love hearing what people think about my blog so feel free to leave a comment below and browse around. You can also find me on Bloglovin’, or follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+ and Pinterest.


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