It has been 3 or 4 months in the making and I’m glad that it is almost done. I have had this idea for some time because my blog looked outdated, buggy, and resented the fact that I it had so many issues after going back and forth with the previous designers.

The Reason for the Switch

I needed to spice it up some. I wanted to do something that didn’t cost me much money and would allow me to change things if I wanted to on the fly. I know the learning curve would be high, but the amount of time that I spent with getting the design right last year didn’t sit well with me.

There is no reason to mention the previous designers that I dealt with. All I’m going to say is that it was expensive as hell. For this blog redesign itself I spent more than $2,000 dollars and it took the designer and I to agree on the look, feel and functioning of the website 7 or so months. We exchanged upwards of 150 plus emails and at least 20 calls. I was on a mission to getting it done and nothing was going to stop me, not even my wallet.

What Did I Do About It?

I was reading a couple of blogs and noticed this one guy using a design template that he had full access to. He didn’t know much coding but his website looked decent. I went to the website that he bought the template and was sold on the ease of moving things around and getting the look and feel that I was after. I didn’t buy immediately because I didn’t want to get something and leave it sitting there and not being used. I was trying to change my ways and began a month or two research of reading as many reviews as possible.

I finally purchased the software in March or so for $200 bucks. I messed around with the template interface for a couple of months and got used to moving things around. But, it got to the point that it was taking me longer than I wanted so I went ahead and bought a skin for $75 bucks a couple of days ago. I spent a couple of hours this past weekend working on the design and for the most part done with my design. The only thing left to do is get somebody to redesign my header banner.

Even though it took me so many hours to learn the software, which is called Headway Themes, I’m happy because I got a basic and up-to-date looking website for under $300 bucks. The thing that I love about this is that I can use this template on any other website I own and do all of the design on my own at no extra cost to me. This is the thing that I love and will continue to get better. I might even learn some coding to help me out with my design even more.

In the next couple of weeks I will do a write up of the process I went to in designing my photography website.