Evolution of kristarella.com

The metamorphosis of my blog from birth until now.

Blue and green boxes: Everyone starts with default, right?

Terrace diary: After learning a bit of CSS I managed to make this one with a fixed background. I learnt a lot trying to make it, which made it easier to produce more. I felt this one was too busy and difficult to read so I made something different.

Blue and purple: Not wanting to waste the cartoon that I made, I integrated it into something much less busy.

Blue: Upon my move to Wordpress I tweaked the look that I already had. Changing the shadow from blue to grey, making the black lines thinner and adding some 1px borders to sharpen it up. I had a bit of fun with the footer too, “This and that was brought to you by the letter A and the number 2.”

Red heart: I called it red although it’s a little more on the pink side. I felt the need for something warmer than blue. This one is simpler too, fewer images (e.g. for sidebar headings), just simple CSS, with a touch of hubby’s javascript to roll up the sidebar menus.

Grey stripes: As you can see I’m very creative with names /* end sarcasm */. I was inspired by designers’ sites that were grey with splashes of colour. People didn’t like the font in the header and sidebar, but I still do. It was grungy… I like grungy things.

Christmas ‘06: I added some Christmas lights to my existing template. I was feeling festive that Christmas. :grin:

Angels: January 2007, my most popular theme yet (from the comments I received). I liked this one a lot. The font in the sidebar was pretty, it was the first time I’d made a header image in Inkscape, the top menu buttons slid down when you hovered over them, it was all good fun.

Copyblogger: June 2007, my variation on the Copyblogger theme by Chris Pearson. It overtook my angels theme in popularity and I love the simplicity of it.

This theme also went:
Pink for October 2007 — in support of Breast Cancer Awareness month.

Ocean blue in November 2007.

Searching for the king for Christmas 2007.

kristarella.com in January 2008.
I changed the name of the site because “This and that” was a bit of a lame name and didn’t really mean anything. kristarella doesn’t necessarily mean much either, other than it’s the name I’ve been using on the internet for the last few year.
I kept the Copyblogger ocean theme until May 2008.

kristarella.com mid 2008
I learnt so much through using the Copyblogger theme and helping others use it that I wanted to write my own theme from scratch. I thought a lot about semantic code and readability and tried to make something simple, but unique.

kristarella.com on Thesis
While I was doing honours in Molecular Biology during 2008 I also learnt all about the Thesis theme. After a few months of helping people with CSS and PHP on the Thesis forums I finally got around to porting my site design to Thesis.

Kristarella Studios
When I launched Kristarella Studios at the start of 2009 I created a new site design to go with it. I wanted to strip all the excess material and got rid of sidebars all together, making it easier to focus on blog posts, photography and business.