Notice Anything New?

You may have noticed a few changes around here lately…Blondes & Bagels has been re-designed!

Blondes & Bagels actually began as a happy accident. My wonderful boyfriend KB is a sports nut so for our two year anniversary I bought him his own domain and set him up a sports blog (I’d link to it but apparently he likes to tell me about sports more than he likes to write about it online). Okay, so my present to him failed…but I loved the process of building his blog so much that I started my own! Picking a name was actually the easiest part: I’m a blonde and I love bagels. And what blog is complete without a solid alliteration? Thus “Blondes & Bagels” was born.

Did you know that this awesome community has grown from only KB and my mom reading this blog to nearly 4,000 of you #BagelBabes reading along every month? Seriously guys, you rock. I’ve learned a ton about you all in these last 10 months (like how much you all care about staying hydrated) and I hope I’ve been able to entertain you along the way! We’ve grown so much together that I thought it was time the aesthetic of Blondes & Bagels reflected how much we’ve grown!

Original Logo:

I can’t say I didn’t love the original Blondes & Bagels logo – I mean come on, it’s awesome. I’ll totally be locking it away in the vault for use in the future when all us #BagelBabes are super famous and we feel like having a retro logo throwback. Also shout out to my grandma because she totally sketched up that little blonde holding the bagel cartoon that became the OG logo for Blondes & Bagels!

As I’ve approached my one year “blogiversary” I’ve started to think about how much this blog has grown and changed and that really inspired me to do a full re-design! But where to start? First and foremost I want to write articles that I love – but about things that you #BagelBabes find helpful, inspiring, and fun. I want this blog to be a happy place for both you and I! I sifted through tons of pictures of things that make me happy and created some inspirational mood boards to get an idea for what our new “happy place” together could look like!

Inspiration:

So basically white, pink, black, peonies, corgis, bagels, brunch, minimalist fashion, and world travel. You feel me? Sweet.

The next step in the process was tossing all those collages at my coworker who happens to do design on the side. “Okay so here’s a thousand pictures of flowers, corgis, and carbs – can you design me a new logo from all this?” She came back a couple weeks later with a sassy new minimalist logo, bagel earrings and all.

Oh and don’t forget the super hilarious favicon/mini logo she came up with: a bagel with a ponytail worthy of a Disney princess. I seriously died when she showed me. “That one was just for fun, a joke” she said. Lolz. Um, no joking here IT’S SO GOOD.

The new logos were just the tip of the iceberg – I also wanted to make the functionality of the site easier for you! A huge shout out to my friends over at WPZOOM (they make awesome premade themes for all you WordPress users out there). I’ve worked with their team on many occasions asking questions, making changes, etc, but I finally wrote to them with a big challenge: I felt my current layout wasn’t the easiest reading experience for all of you at home. I challenged them to help me fix that – and they totally did.

If you remember the previous layout was a little more of a “grid’ style, now you’ll see that Blondes & Bagels is one easy to read column with a sidebar! this means you’ll be able to read along by scrolling down the page with big, beautiful, large images for you to view and click on. You’ll be able to get a better idea of if you want to click the “read more” for a post than you did before, and the new sidebar makes it easier for us to be friends on social media and for you to check out the popular posts of the day! I’m so happy with these updates and I hope you are too – it was all in an attempt to make your reading experience easier and more fun!

I’m so excited about the new design changes of Blondes & Bagels – but I’d really love to hear what you think! So calling all #BagelBabes – shout out your opinions in the comments below!

Oh, and check out my awesome new post signature. 😉