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I just had the privilege of working on a complete Branding and WordPress Theme Design with the Coupon Queen Holly from over at CentsAble Stewardship. Holly was looking for a more professional web presence as well as a way to better organize her blog about savings. She had a few ideas in mind, but wasn’t really sure about the next step. After discussing her needs, we were able to get her blog and feeds moved from the Blogger Platform over to the more powerful WordPress Platform as well as come up with a completely customized and professional logo and theme design.

This is what the old site used to look like. While Holly’s old blog did feature a menu, it was still pretty cluttered and didn’t have a nice uniform or professional look or use even use text colors that were easy to read. It was also extremely difficult to navigate due to the lack of menu options available and the setup. The first thing I knew we would need to do was to give Holly plenty of menu space to help her readers easily navigate her site to find the resources they are looking for. I did this by adding two horizontal menus separated by the header so as not to appear too cluttered. Both have drop down menus associated with them that are easy to edit and customize through the WordPress Menu panel. This allowed Holly to separate static pages on the top from a separate category and subcategory menu beneath the header. I also gave her a Vertical Menu in the sidebar for her Weekly Topic Categories to further divide things up. Along with extra menus, I also designed some matching social icons for Holly and inserted them into the header so that they didn’t take up unnecessary room within the sidebar. The extra menus also freed up a lot of sidebar space for Holly to use on other things.

It was also imperative to give Holly’s site a distinct and uniform look. By creating a custom logo, I was able to then using the logo’s style, colors, and textures from that logo as an inspiration for the rest of the theme design. The logo is a combination of an image to capture the style and theme of her site along with styled text that clearly tells the reader what to expect from this site. I combined colors that Holly liked with some fun feminine script and used some rustic touches throughout so that the blog is professional and gender neutral while still having a touch of femininity.

Holly is currently busy organizing all of her posts into their respective categories and getting her site just the way she wants it. Make sure to check it out for some awesome money and time saving tips and resources!

Are you in need of a custom design or redesign? Check out the Design Services I offer, then contact me when you are ready to get started!

© 2011, Sarah. All rights reserved.

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