The Little Magpie {Blog Relaunch}

It’s time!

There are plenty of little tiny tweaks that still need to be made, but I couldn’t wait any longer: it feels like February 29 is the perfect day to leap wildly into the relaunch of The Little Magpie!

And the most exciting part (well, for me…) is this gorgeous new hand-drawn magpie logo by the fabulous Jeanetta Darley:

Jeanetta’s full magpie sketch is at the bottom of this post, and I’m currently heckling her to do some notecards and a full print for me. I’m just incredibly impressed with her skill and her ability to pull a concept out of my head and bring it to life. Be sure to check out her art!

In addition to the logo, he site also has a fresh new theme called Sassafras (from Hello You Design Studio on Etsy).

I designed a brand inspiration board to keep me on track in terms of the look I wanted for the new site, and used the header photo of my family flying kites as the inspiration for a lot of the muted tones, hazy colors and pops of cardinal red I envisioned for the site.

While I’m pretty comfortable building and working in WordPress, I brought in the pros (Michael at Type 3 Web Design in Bentonville) to help me move to WordPress.org, convert all three of my blogs into a multisite and install the theme. He was amazing and saved me countless hours, and he handled everything (as well as all sorts of other bells and whistles) within a week. I can’t recommend him highly enough!

[dropcaps]S[/dropcaps]o what? All of this simply means that there is one hub for my blogs (upper left corner of the homepage), which is going to be far simpler for me to manage and less overwhelming for visitors as well.

Lots of credit for the motivation for this transition also goes to Lela Davidson and my cohorts in the Second Story Writer’s Workshop – it was time for my blog to be a place I wanted to go to write regularly once again. The workshop was exactly what I needed to shift my goals into high gear.

[info_box type=”gray_box”]Heads-up: the newsletter is going to be really fun – I hope you’ll check it out! The first one goes out later this week, and I have some goodies in store.[/info_box]

Please be patient – there are a few links and pages that still need tightening, a couple of colors to tweak and cobwebs to clean out, but I couldn’t wait any longer.

[dropcaps]I[/dropcaps] hope you like it and can’t wait to hear your feedback!

P.S. If you’re interested, details on the entire site transition are covered over on  Magpie Marketing.