Fashionista Barbie 3.0

Welcome to the new look Fashionista Barbie, a whole new design to celebrate my wonderful blog turning five last month, I know I’m mean no fanfare, cake or even a present, but that’s because I was waiting to present my shiny new look, which I hope you agree was worth the wait, the lack of blog posts this week, and the general disruption, but fret no more normal blogging will now resume.

There have been some tweaks over the years, all done by me, none professional, and to be honest I don’t know how I’ve gotten away with a poor looking site for so long, and this year I decided to have a makeover, out with the old and in with the new. I think the only thing that remains is the two-column layout and the profile pic, and bless that straw bear hat but that will be going soon too.

You’ll see straight off new colours, I’m kind of obsessed with this watercolour-style mint green, I just felt it was the right hue to make a modern, chic impression, and I think it really works well against the grey, well it is the new black after all. The combination for me just works perfectly – more stylish don’t you think?

Social media is at the forefront, want to follow me all you need to do is click on my social media icons either in the sticky menu, did you see it follows you down the page, under my profile in the side bar, and if you missed those, there are more in the footer. Also at the end of each post I’ve included social links so if you Love It. Share It., basically just looking to make things easier for you to follow me and share the things you love.

I’ve also thought about all you Pinterest lovers, addicts, obsessives **delete as appropriate**, so to pin any of my images all you need to do is hover over it and a cute Pin It button appears, there is even a Pinterest-vibe in some of the post layouts, sneaky peak below that I adore, all you have to do is click on an image and it takes you into a scrolling gallery so you can see the pictures up close.

If you keep scrolling, you will notice a fab new footer dedicated to all of our favourite photo-sharing platform, Instagram. Bravo to my fab web designers, **check them out as even though my theme was custom they have some great pre-made themes**, I had a vision of a Polaroids displaying my latest Instagram snaps and they brought it to life beautifully, I love it. It means you can click-through to follow me now, if you don’t already, plus you can see my latest social adventures, to share the love just tap on the actual photograph.

I’ve also made the homepage a little less cluttered, no more scrolling for days to read my latest posts, all you need to do now is click-through, this means I can use more photos, I do love a good visual, as well as feature larger shopping posts, basically means you can get to the posts you want to read, quicker and easier, plus it should speed up the load time on my blog.

If you are reading this from a smartphone or a tablet, why hello, did you notice that the blog looks a lot different? Yep my web designers have made sure no matter how you love to view Fashionista Barbie that it looks good on all platforms.

I think that’s all the major changes and I hope you like the new vibe, it has been a labour of love these past few months, trying to get everything just right. So I’ve tripled checked that everything is working fine, as have my web team, but you know sometimes things sneak through the cracks, so if anything doesn’t appear to view right, or if something goes wrong, if you could kindly tweet me or leave me a comment that would be super – as the whole point is to make coming to Fashionista Barbie more enjoyable, easier, quicker and something you’ll want to do daily.

Content is something that hasn’t changed, well maybe a little, I cringe a little at the early blog posts **please don’t search for them**, but lately you will have noticed that I have been blogging a little more, take out planning a wedding and I suddenly have all this extra time, add to that how happy I’ve been feeling this year and it really has led to more inspiring content, well I hope so. Would love to know what you think, plus what you’d like to see more of, as even though I blog because I love it, I also want to make sure you guys are having fun as well.

So come on be honest – what do you think of Fashionista Barbie 3.0? Leave me a comment below.