blog design

(image via Made by Girl by Jen Ramos)

You may have noticed some changes around the tiny hummingbird lately and there are more to come! Once I started changing the look and layout I became slightly obsessed and have been bothering Matt nightly with requests to design new sidebar buttons, resize my banner, change the color scheme... and on it goes. Some days I feel ambitious, temporarily overcome my fear of HTML and CSS, and delve into the world of blogger tutorials. Some days I'm successful, and on those days I regale Matt with exciting tales of how I changed the width of my sidebar! and he gives me a patronizing smile. Some days I am frustrated, and on those days I compile a list of things I need Matt to help me with and persuade him to check off every item on my list before the night is over. To save some fellow bloggers (and their innocent web savvy husbands or boyfriends), I figured I would share a list of the links that I've found helpful. Hopefully these are useful to someone! And if anyone knows how to decrease the amount of space between sidebar buttons, please, do tell.

- I learned how to remove the navbar and remove borders from images from Alli's post
- this post helped me fuss with the width of my sidebar and main column
- I decided against it (for now), but here's how to create three columns
- it took forever, but I finally got my social media icons to work
- I considered switching the sidebar from right to left (for now I'm keeping it on the right)
- how to stop being a no-reply blogger - this is only slightly related, but applies to those of you who read blogs but don't write blogs. Comments are one of my favorite things about blogging, and I read every single one that I get. They're forwarded to my blog email address (thetinyhummingbirdblog at gmail), so I often reply to comments via email. Lately, I've been experimenting with replying in the comments section, but I still think it's probably easier for commenters to receive an email response than to keep checking the comment thread. Anyway, there are times when I receive a comment from someone whose email address isn't visible in his or her blogger profile, and then the address shows up as "no-reply blogger" and I can't respond directly. This issue has been bothering me for a while and I'd been planning on writing a little tutorial on how to make your email address visible in your profile, but then I discovered that one of my favorite bloggers did the work for me by writing this post just last week. Visit dandee for super simple instructions on how to not be a no-reply blogger anymore. Because I want to write back to you!

Any tips or tricks you care to share?