Blog Mistakes & Evolution

Monday night around 6pm, I thought it was about time I updated the header over here at Hit the Ground Running. Little did I know, it would cause a little stress and take two hours of my time to fix.

To keep a long, boring story short, what happened was that I considered turning my blog blue instead of its usual purple. Rather than changing the colors manually, I fiddled around with the template, and the next thing you know, the blog was restored it its original settings, which meant it was coral!

I shouldn't have clicked that...

Luckily I had saved the specs for my backgrounds, headings, fonts, etc. So I dug out my external hard-drive and set everything back like I had it, one setting at a time.

And this is why we back things up. I was so relieved I still had this!

Then I played with the header. Choosing pictures is really hard! I felt like all the running photos were redundant, but I wanted to pick photos that were important to me currently and more recent than in the old header. 

I also cleaned up the text a little; I wanted a simpler look to go along with my focus on simplicity in my running this year. I'm not a graphic designer or artist by any stretch of the imagination, but I think I did okay.

The pictures I settled on are: me after PR'ing the A1A marathon; Kristin and me crossing the finish line together after running the Gasparilla 15k; me contemplating life at one of my favorite running spots; me and Matt on my birthday at the A1A half; me doing my two favorite things at once.

My header has been through quite an evolution as I've gotten more into blogging. Here's what it used to look like way back in the day:

This was the first time I ever created something like this, and I was pretty proud.

Then, I decided my photos needed to be more fitness oriented, so I got rid of the headshot.

Of course, then I discovered PicMonkey and loved how streamlined I could make everything look! I never liked the space between all the pictures in this one, though.

Anyway, once I had the photos figured out, I finalized the look with a new subheading and uploaded it...only to decide that the background was a smidge too dark. So I remade it all over again. And then I decided I didn't like the zoom on one of the photos, but by this time it was 8pm and I wasn't going to waste the rest of my night on this thing!

Just kidding, I fixed the zoom, and it took me another 30 minutes because I was having trouble matching the background color perfectly again.

Now...back to contemplating the color scheme...

When's the last time you updated your blog's look?
How did you choose your header pictures?

ABK