Day 2: Make This Blog Look Pro

Refining, Redoing, and Refining my blog

December 27, 2023

Ah, day 2. I’m trying to refine my blog and would really appreciate your input! That aside, taking care to make a website look nice is really harder than I thought. All I thought I needed to do was put up a few pictures and be done with it, but it was not that simple. So here’s to day 2:

Pictures Problems

The first problem I encountered was that I had no idea where I was going to get free images. I don’t have the money to buy pictures off of websites, and I am definitely NOT going to just steal people’s work. Fortunately, a teacher of mine came to my aid, she introduced me to Pexels. (No, this is not paid content haha) The website has a collection of vintage-style book photography and they are free to use! I can’t believe such a site exists and I’m so grateful for all the photographers that have generously shared their art on the platform.

All the buttons

WordPress is exceedingly puzzling. There are too many options for too many details. Every click brings me to a new feature and it is definitely more-than-a-bit overwhelming. It’s great that so much is there to use and make this space better, but as a complete newbie when it comes to website building, I almost gave up. Navigating the maze of pages, posts, forms, and blocks brought nothing less than utter confusion. (Maybe this is how Harry felt when he entered the wizarding world?) I did find a few online tutorials that helped and I once again had to acknowledge that sticking to simplicity on my first try is probably the best idea for now.

Only one blog?

I was told by several websites that WordPress simply doesn’t have a built-in structure for 2 feeds in a single website. That came as quite a disappointment for me as I really want to have a book blog AND an area for book reviews. There are a few solutions and plugins that seem to sere the purpose but I’m still trying to work that out. So for now, the Book Reviews button doesn’t actually lead to book reviews 🙁 I’m super sorry if that turned up when you were going through my website. I will be dealing with this though, and hopefully I will be able to launch my reviews soon!

There are still quite a lot of wrinkles to smooth out in here so bear with me! This book blog journey has come off on a bit of a rocky start, but I’m sure things will turn out to be fine. Let’s all read on and blog on!