Feast your eyes all: This is the new feliciaday.com. Sleek, sophisticated, flirty, and stylishly accessible. If only I could be so cool in person. Can you tell I’m gleeful?!?! 🙂
For many years I’ve lived a life of website envy; bookmarking sites I loved, trying to tweak premium WordPress themes in imitation (mostly ending up with god-awful backgrounds and NOT well-designed eye-splitting colors, LOL). With the 2009 New Year I resolved to blog more, but realized my website was one of my big limitations in motivation: It didn’t encourage interactivity, and basic information wasn’t accessible to the casual browser. A few weeks ago I Twittered my frustration about getting a better website and got a lot of wonderful responses that happened to include an offer of skills from a wonderful designer Dane Hesseldahl. I clicked on his site and totally fell in love with his work: Simple, clean, stylish. Yes, please!
After we started corresponding, Dane came up with several brilliant designs for the site, all of which blew me away. We settled on a design I believe he referred to as “Southern girl takes LA/modern but old-fashioned feel” that was based a lot on my love of Typography. I’m not sure how he did it, but it was love at first website sight!
Please browse around, every part of the site is brand spanking new. You’ll notice that the site is laid out quite simply, yet is packed with information. There are too many details to point out without causing you to glaze over, but I’d love to draw attention to a few items that I think are notable/unique:
-I’m still working on a WordPress platform. I can change anything about the site within the WordPress dashboard with no technical knowledge whatsoever.
-The site serves as a central hub to all my online social networking sites, but also integrates those sites back to here seamlessly through widgets and other featured areas. It’s a two-way street of information. Some assets, like my headshots on Flickr, were left elsewhere rather adding another website page. Why duplicate and clutter up the site?
-I already mentioned my love of Typography, so the site uses a bold header font everywhere. I believe it has something to do with Flash, but I’ll concede ignorance and just say it looks pretty. And what a difference a logo makes! Lovely!
-The main limitation in WordPress sites is the static sidebar. Dane included something pretty unique which I now feel should be required of EVERY WordPress blog: A dropdown menu to choose different widgets for each website page. Each page on the site has different widgets and I can add/subtract at a click of a button. It makes it feel much more layered and deep and makes the WordPress blog engine a true CMS. So wonderful!
-To keep the look unified, Dane tweaked and customized several of the sidebar widgets; for instance, the Last.fm one on the About page. Also with the ability to change the sidebar on each page we added some interesting widgets, like an RSS to a Google Alert on “Felicia Day” in the Press page, and The Guild playlist RSS on MSN on the Videos page.
I’d love to hear what you think and am so excited to have the site up and running! It will be so hard to keep from blogging now…I know it! 🙂 Thank you Dane (@dane_hesseldahl on Twitter), I dub thee: “WordPress Wizard.”