Our Blog Makeover: A Fresh Look, New Features, Same Us

After months of behind-the-scenes work (seriously — these kinds of overhauls take time), we finally launched our blog redesign. Like most projects, we hit a few unexpected bumps along the way: random coding issues, a couple of site crashes (thanks for bearing with us), and even an earthquake and a hurricane that slowed things down. In the end we decided it was better to ship the new design and keep improving it live rather than wait for perfection. It’s not entirely finished, and it may need more tweaks, but we’re excited to share the update.

We’re honestly surprised we didn’t refresh the site sooner. The same look and layout had stuck around since spring 2008, and while our house and tastes changed many times, the blog background didn’t. It felt like wearing clothes that no longer fit — familiar but dated. While we know some readers are attached to the old style (we get sentimental too), it felt like the right time for a lighter, updated design.

What we aimed to achieve

• Refresh the visual identity — new colors, patterns, and type that reflect our current home and style.
• Make the header feel broader and more representative of everything we write about, not just the “house” angle.
• Lighten the palette to avoid the heaviness of the old color scheme.
• Improve navigation so readers can find content more easily.
• Bring the overall look up to date so it feels more like 2011 and less like 2008.

These are the results of our amateur web-designing attempts. We’ve been tweaking for weeks and we really like the direction, though more adjustments are coming. If the new layout feels strange at first, give it a few days — it’s a bit like rearranging a room. You usually need time to get used to it.

Meaning behind the header items

For the header we photographed a group of small objects that mean something to us, laid out on white cardstock. Here’s what each item represents:

• Photostrips — we’ve always loved them (they even featured in our wedding).
• Pictures of Clara and Burger — they’re as much part of this blog as any DIY project.
• A small wooden “C” block and a bone-shaped dog treat — another nod to Clara and Burger.
• A little wooden skyscraper and taxi cabs — a reminder that we met in NYC in 2004.
• Pennies — we save spare change; the seven cents add up to a lucky number for us, and the pennies are dated 2007, when the blog began.
• A Richmond magnet — we live in and love Richmond.
• Paint swatches and fabric samples — our idea of fun and a reflection of our current home’s palette.
• The key to our house — sentimental, though we altered the tip in Photoshop for privacy.
• A photo of our current house — of course the cheerful yellow door made the cut.
• A white ceramic rhino — our quirky mascot (after Burger and our dearly departed ceramic dog).

The background pattern is actually an homage to our old logo: many tiny little hearts (the YHL heart) repeated and rotated to create an abstract pattern. Below are the main functional updates we added during the redesign.

New features and functional changes

1. Young House Life: We launched a side site called Young House Life to host everyday, smaller moments — quick Clara & Burger photos and videos, behind-the-scenes tidbits, and bits that don’t warrant full posts on the main blog. It’s an extra channel for bonus content and has its own feed if you want to follow those updates separately.

2. Paint color page: We added a central page that lists all the paint colors we’ve used in this house, now linked from the sidebar so readers can find our color choices quickly.

   

3. Source list: A dedicated source page now gathers where we found nearly everything in this house, and it’s linked in the sidebar for easy reference.

   

4. Fav. Posts: A sidebar widget highlights favorite posts with thumbnails and links. We’ll refresh this regularly so readers can discover standout archive content more easily.

   

5. Videos: A Videos button on the sidebar now displays thumbnails for several of our clips. Previously they lived in the header bar; this gives them a better home lower on the page.

   

6. Giving Back: We added a Giving Back button that highlights three charities we support — organizations focused on homes, kids, and animals. Each one is close to our hearts and part of our annual giving.

   

7. We refreshed many sidebar buttons (House Crashing, etc.) with updated images and colors for a cleaner, more cohesive look. We also renamed our Twitter button to “Tweetersiks” — a small pun tribute to someone we love.

   

8. Pagination: Inspired by others in the blog community, we added improved pagination so you can navigate back through the archives more easily — handy if you want to dig into older posts.

   

What’s next

We still have a running to-do list, and here are a few things we hope to roll out over time:

• Give the Projects page a full renovation so it includes images instead of just a long list of links (we’ve completed over 500 projects and want that visual representation).
• Update the designs and headers on our Mood Boards and Room Gallery pages, which still use the older stripe styles.
• Add many more makeovers to our Room Gallery, including Reader Redesigns from the archives.

Those items should keep us busy for a while. We also have a few hands-on projects at home to finish, like our $6 cabinet makeover, so we’ll probably alternate between web updates and DIY. Web design can be fun when you’re in the zone, but there’s nothing like paint-stained hands and sawdust to make you feel accomplished.

We hope you like the new look. Have you refreshed a site or tried a new color scheme lately? We’d love to hear what excited you — whether it was a small tweak or a full redesign that kept you up until 2:52 a.m.