Is it weird that I was more excited with the whole Street Love ❤ rebranding three months ago than I am now that everything is live? That is because I have been planning for this for so long and since I can get bored very easily, I got bored along the way no thanks to draggy designers that promises things but never deliver. It took me a few months to settle everything else, finally sit down to think of what I want, what I envisioned for Street Love, and to actually sitting down doing it.

The whole Street Love rebranding started off with the logo. Street Love or in short SL❤ will become my company identity. It is a part of the growing up process for Street Love. I grew up, so Street Love must too 😉 . I was thinking to take off the ❤ from the logo but I did not have the heart to do so. I like the ❤ there so the heart remains at the moment until I figured something else 4 years later lol. Actually I want to launch the new site layout WITH the new logo but somehow I did the logo first and update it immediately to see how I feel about it. If I like it, I might not do the whole new site layout as that could take me a lot of time and stress. I like the logo but I still wanted a new layout so here we are!

A walk through the new HomePage

I had the smooth scrolling enabled and it was annoying so I removed it. Just in case you are wondering 🙂 . As you scroll down the homepage, the first thing you will notice is the Sticky Menu. This feature is also seen at my other site Modern Mavens but Modern Mavens one is much more cooler as the site logo appears on the left hand side of the menu. Here, it does not have that. Why oh why!

I also maintained the Site Search, inherited from the old layout. If you are looking for something and you did not want to go through the search from the menu on top (below logo) or through the category dropdown menu, you can just type in the search bar and you will redirected to a new page with all the search results. Pretty cool if you have never tried this. I personally search for my own review a lot with this LOL.

I have decided to remove the previous Feedburner email subscription although that was pretty good IMHO. It served me well for the past 4 years. The new layout comes with MailChimp email subscription but I could not get the form to work so I removed it and put in a different email subscription. What this Subscribe For Update does is that WordPress will send you an email of my new blog post soon after the post went live. That if you subscribe 😉

Recent Posts list are also maintained. This is where you find all recently added blog post (limited to just 5). Alternatively, you can scroll all the way down to the bottom and click next for more blog post.

Tips & Tricks is similar to the previous Special Feature list that I had on the old layout. This list refreshes to a different list as there are a few categories rotating. I will figure out which I had missed and add into this section.

Categories is pretty much self explanatory. This dropdown menu is also something I personally used a lot to find a category of blog post I was looking for. Archives on the other hand is not seen from the old layout as I did not find them useful for me at least but since everyone have it on their site, I suppose I ‘have’ to include in mine too right? 😛

At the very bottom is where my Instagram Feed are. I had been doing a lot of thinking if I want to include this or remove it. This feature is actually on the top of the layout, together with a gigantic recent post slider. Both are not feasible for a readable blog so I removed it. The Instagram feed however suits to be at the bottom. I still do not know how I feel about this yet.

The Footer of the new layout comes with 3-column. This is the most headache part. What else to include as everything else is already on the Sidebar? So I thought this section is where you can do a little reading About Me *ehem*, Top Read of The Day aka Top Post, which refreshes differently each time based on clicks /visits, and Recent Comments. Both of the list are not seen from the old layout. Since I have space, why not, eh?

Notice the arrow with Go To Top pink box at the bottom right? It will appear at the same position no matter where you scroll to. Anytime you want to go back up to the top, just click on top and voila.

Blog Post

Now that I have covered the site in general, let me show you how each blog post looks like 🙂

Here is an interesting fact. I chosen this layout mainly because I like how the first photo appears on top, above the blog post title. I do not know what is wrong with my site that I have been seeing double image even on the HomePage itself. I asked for help from the theme developer and they gave me a code to delete one of the image so I am left with one photo (yay!) but the bad news is, the first photo does not appears on the top like how I like it 🙁 . It is either double photo or this. Anyway I am still tweaking the html code so the photo appear on top.

Now, this I like. At the end of the post, you will find Previous Article (left) and Next Article (right). Most new layout has this feature now. My old one does not so something new 🙂 .

Related Posts on the other hand now comes with 3 articles instead of 5 articles. This is a feature included in the template so I cannot change that. On the bright side, it is now bigger! 😀

The Comment box is bigger and I had them customized a little bit as the original version was missing something.

Introducing Mega Menu

Another exciting new feature, which I have in my Modern Mavens and now I have it here too. It is called Mega Menu. When you hover the mouse pointer to the News tab located at the top menu, you will see a list of post tiles. Unfortunately I cannot use this on all of my menu tab as it is very huge, otherwise it will congest the whole site hehe. Let me figure out and add where appropriate 🙂

When you click on any Category, you will see a grid layout. At least something different rather than seeing the same layout throughout the whole site.

You will also notice how the Sidebar shrunk smaller compared to the size from the HomePage. I am still figuring out the html coding for this.

Mobile Site

I now love my mobile site. Not that I do not like my old one. Just that the old one comes with a standard mini logo unless I pay for premium whereas the new layout enables me to include a bigger logo!

I do not like the mobile site menu so I have disable that. The one you are seeing now is so much nicer 😀

Everything else are pretty much the same, just simplified, smaller and compact.

Hope the new layout gives you a better browsing and reading experience. Thank you to each and everyone of you for bearing with me throughout the whole of last week while the site goes under Maintenance. The layout may undergo changes every now and then but this home girl and everything else remains the same. If you encounter any issue with any of the feature on the site, please do let me know immediately at the comment box below or you can always email me anytime or on anything else at fiona (at) street-love (dot) net 😉

Giveaway coming soon. Just need to photograph the prize 😛 . Hope you will have a great week ahead ❤