As I set out to bling out my blog I decided I would work to get rid of the things that irritate me about me most about it.  As an art teacher there are always little visual irritants that eat at me.  The screen shot to the right is what my blog used to look like.

I love the look of the Magazino theme but I was always struggling to get the pictures to look the way I wanted them.  As you can see the heading image would always be cropped awkwardly and the thumbnails pictures on the bottom would only show up occasionally. To me I felt these inconstancies made things look a bit unprofessional.  That being said I decided to switch my theme to something similar but a little more user friendly and less time consuming. I wanted the most recent post in the header and tiles of posts below just like Magazino but I didn’t want to put so much time into making sure my picture settings just right.  I managed to get a little simplicity and the look I was going for with the Photogram theme posted below.

The second little irritant on my agenda was to organize my content better for my users.  I did this by making a bunch of categories, applying them to each post, and adding widgets related to categories. This may not completely fall under the category of making my blog more visually appealing but it definitely hikes up my usability factor.  The screen shot below is of a post with new widgets to help navigate through my blog.  None of these changes are earth shattering, rather they are small changes that can go along way.  Like most things it’s a matter of getting the framework set up first and from then on out life should hopefully be a little easier for me and my readers.