Blog Updates

You may have noticed little additions and changes popping up on the blog over the past couple of weeks/months (if you did, good job! pat yourself on the back). Since starting the blog back in October, I've been slowly customizing it to fit the personality and style of May Richer Fuller Be. My desire is for it to be clean, modern and simple (which is kind of what I want my life to look like too :) ). I'm hoping the "look" of the blog reflects those things, and that my posts do as well.

To be perfectly honest, I still feel like I'm trying to figure out my "voice" in the design/home blog niche. I think that there's always room for more creativity, but this is definitely an over-saturated corner of the blog world. If you've been reading since the beginning (ahem, probably three of you), thank you for sticking around, and if you're new, welcome!

DIY projects, graphic design and organizing are my favorite subjects to cover here, and while I would love to have a project or update to share with you every day, I can't even come close to promising that since I do, after all, have a day job that takes up 40+ hours of my week. I know that's true for many bloggers out there (can I get an amen?), so we use the nights and weekends we have available to do these things we love. I'm not writing this to complain, because I love writing this blog. When I started it, I decided very early on to commit to writing consistently. To dive head first and see where it took me. I truly hope you enjoy reading what you see here, and if there's anything different you'd like to see, let me know. I'm always open to new ideas!

Ok, getting off my soapbox now...

What I really want to share with you today are some updates on how this little blog works and navigates. The blogs I love make it easy for readers to go back and find old posts, read all the posts in a series, and connect with the author. Though I'm no website whiz, I do think the updates I've made since starting the blog are helpful for doing some of those things. I'm sure there will be more to come...

Shall we take a little tour of these things together? I'll try not to bore you too much and please excuse me if I get a little over-excited about this stuff :). The yellow boxes and arrows point to what I want to focus on in each screen shot. (If you're reading this post through a feed, email, or something like Google Reader, you may want to click over to the site to fully appreciate the rest of the post!)

Let's begin with the navigation bar below the header:

This is a great place to start if you're new to the blog and want to know more about me, see posts from a series on the blog (Creative Bits and Operation Reorganization are my current ones), or want to visit my Etsy shop (CSW Designs). This appears at the top of every page of the blog, so it's easy to find.

Now heading over to the sidebar...

This is (hopefully) pretty self-explanatory, but these three boxes show the best ways to communicate with me, find things on the blog, and follow May Richer Fuller Be.

You can click on each individual button in the "connect" box to find me in social media and email. From left to right, the buttons are: Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Email and RSS Feed.

The search box lets you enter keywords to find an old post or posts about certain subjects.

You can subscribe by email by entering your address in "follow" box. This will deliver new posts to your inbox automatically.

Continuing down the sidebar...

Again, self explanatory, but this box leads to my Etsy shop (again) and shows you what's new in the shop (currently my Richmond Fan District art print).

Inching farther down the sidebar you'll find...

The "popular posts" box shows what people have been reading the most. It's currently showing my office organization posts, which have been pretty popular!

The "blog archive" let's you see posts by month. I find the search bar to be a better tool to find old posts, but this is another option as well.

If you have a Google account, you can sign up to "join this site" on Google Friend Connect. It keeps track of blogs you follow in a feed format starting with the newest ones at the top.

Finally, at the bottom, there are a few things to note...

"Related posts" shows, duh, related posts to the one you just read. I've found that the widget that defines "related" is not always accurate, but I still think it's a nice feature. 

My favorite button is this little red "Pin it" button. It makes it so easy to pin an image from the post directly (yes!). The only trick to this one is that you have to be on that post's permalink page for it to work. You also can't use it from the mobile site (click "view full web version" at the bottom of a post if you're reading a post in the mobile format). If you're not sure if you're actually on the post's permalink page, all you have to do is click the title of the post. Then scroll down to the Pin it button and you should be able to pin images. (*Update! There's now a "P" button that will pop up if you hover over an image. Click that and you can post the image directly to Pinterest! This is even better than the button :).)

Lastly is the "share it" box. It allows you to email a post to someone, blog about it, tweet the link, post the link to Facebook, or share it on Google+. 

That brings us to the end of the updates. The point of this post is that I love my readers and I want this site to work well for them (y'all!). I've mentioned this before, but I love hearing from you, so I hope that these updates make it easy for you to say hey and stay up to date on the latest posts. Hope this is helpful (and not too boring). If you made it to the end, give yourself a gold star!