A New Look!

Don't worry—you are on Christian Chick's Thoughts, my book review blog, even though it doesn't look like it!

I started Christian Chick's Thoughts in 2008 with a basic Blogger template. Sometime in 2009, I switched to the one I'd used up until today. Also a Blogger template, it was pretty and blue and had blurry flowers in the background.

A couple years ago, I decided to make CCT primarily a book blog and start another blog for more personal posts, and Coffee & Conversation was born. At the time, I found a template I loved for Coffee & Conversation, but it took forever to install and tweak. It was a free template, which I'm sure was my problem—that template didn't come with customer support (go figure!), and I didn't know enough about html to make the process easy. I was so sick of messing with things by the time I finished that I decided CCT was "good enough." But over the past year, I've been feeling that "good enough" ... wasn't. In 2009, my blog design was great! It was pretty. It was on par with other blogs. But in 2016, it looks like a blog designed in 2009. I still think it's pretty, but it's also not very modern.

I've been getting more serious about providing new content for CCT, and I finally decided I needed a design that also reflected my new-found commitment to blogging. A couple months ago, I got some free printables from Designer Blogs and ended up on their mailing list. Their emails are informative and helpful (which is more and more of a rarity these days), and they often advertise blog templates. This week, I finally checked them out, though I figured they would be too expensive. Wrong! Blogger templates are just $15.

Finally, after spending forever looking at the templates and consulting with both of my sisters, I picked one. Get this—the installation process literally took five minutes. That alone was worth the $15. I'm still tweaking things to make the blog exactly what I want, but it's mainly behind the scenes stuff. I'm SOOOOO happy with how it looks!