Changing With The Season
I am thinking about changing templates to something new and different over the upcoming Christmas holidays; but, before I break out the editing tools, I though I’d check with everybody and see if they thought the current template is “stale”. California Girl l and I like the main banner so we’d probably keep it but everything else would change. It takes a LONG time to create a new template since I do it myself. (Don’t worry, there will still be plenty of time to make a movie and do and new photo post.) If anybody has any ideas, please let us know.
One thing we are definitely going to try and do this winter is get out of the house and take some photographs. It might be cold then but I already know how I want for California Girl to warm me up. 
P.S. I really, really hate the first day back to work after being on vacation. I’m not used to waking up any more and, it’s like the first day of school all over again for the children. At least California Girl had a good night’s sleep. I’m going to go see if she can help me “recharge”. Good night everyone. For the first time in a long, long time. MCB is going to bed before midnight.
This template is not stale. If you do change it, keep it simple, easy to read, not cluttered, and light background with dark text 10 pt. or greater.. NOT a black background with red or dark blue text with 5pt size text.. When I come upon a site that is difficult to read, I just bypass it.
try to avoid using graphics(like photo banners and photo backgrounds) that link to other sites like photobucket, to a minimum. This slows down the loading of your page. Keep in mind the rule of thumb. The average person has a less than a 20 second attention span while on-line.
Keep the act of scrolling to a minimum. Like don’t have a 300 pixel heading with a slow loading graphic, 50 pixel is more than enough for a banner. Design for 800×600, not 1024×900. (nothing worse than having to scroll horizontally to view the whole page.
Happy designing.
I like the design now but Im sure I will like just as much anything else you come up with.
I have two weeks vacation starting form New Years Day, I cant wait but I do dread coming back to work afterwards. The early mornings and the backlog of work to get through.
I hope you had fun “recharging”.
Ms SD
Richard: Thanks for the tips. I know that I prefer dark letters on a light background too. I’m not sure what we’re going to do yet but we would like to update things some. We don’t want to have too many graphics; but we don’t want to be to plain either.
Ms SD: When it comes to making templates, I’m not very artistic. I’ve got all of the tools and know what I need to do so I can’t see paying someone to make one for us. But, I’m still not very good at it.
I am so looking forward to my next vacation. I know work will be a zoo when I return but I still don’t care.
I don’t think your template is stale, but I always enjoy seeing what bloggers do next with their desgin.
Whatever you do, I’ll enjoy the anticipation.
Plus, the content will always be great.
DirtyDebbie: Glad to hear that you don’t think our design is too dated. We don’t change it as much as some other bloggers since I’m artistically challenged. If we do make a change, we’ll do it over Christmas vacation. And thanks for the props on our content. Comments, especially complimentary ones, are always appreciated.
I swear I was the only person not off over the holidays. Everyone kept calling in and saying..”since you are there..we really don’t need to be”
There are bad things about being well rounded in our field.
Kelly: I used to cover a lot for people over the holidays since I didn’t go out of town. But we’ve had milestone after milestone to meet on a tight timeline so I was very glad to be away from it all. I had my laptop and checked email very occasionally but, before I left, I made sure everyone knew I was un-recallable except in the most dire emergency. And unlike some past years, no one convinced my boss that anything was a big enough emergency.