I have a new blog design!

Hey look! I have a new blog design!

For a little while now I've been debating on getting a redesign on my blog. When I initially started Thoughts at One in the Morning, it was a mainly young adult blog. I occasionally read other books (adult and middle grade), but that was rare.

Over time, however, my tastes started to change. I slowly began reading a few contemporary romances and the new adult craze began and I was obsessed. Then I discovered the Entangled Brazen and Harlequin Blaze lines and, well, let's just say I became a romance junkie. So instead of rarely reading adult books, I was rarely reading YA.

As you can see above, the previous design looked a lot more YA. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely loved it. But it just wasn't the right fit for the books I read on the blog.

After chatting about it with a friend about it, I decided that it was time. I started browsing around on Etsy for a new design that felt more like me, and I came across this one from Shiny Magic Design. It was the purple that really got to me. Purple = a very Jessica color, and especially this shade. So I contacted Lynsey and got everything moving! (PS: If you're in the market for a new blog design, you should definitely get in touch with her--super great communication and excellent blog design skills.)

Something else that needed to be done (and badly) was the pages. I loved having the dropdown tabs, but a bunch of them over the last couple years became useless. I never updated the Giveaways tab and some of the others were just excessive and could be combined together. So, I went through everything and narrowed all of my tabs down to the minimum needed, merging a few together, and leaving some as hidden tabs linked within other tabs. And you know what? It feels a LOT better now.

I still have to rework some of my other stuff (like my signature, ratings, etc.) to match, but at least the blog in general looks more like me. ^_^

What do you think?