The New and Improved Keep Calm and Chiffon
I’m so excited to announce the relaunch of my blog, Keep Calm and Chiffon!
Now if you’ve been here since the beginning, you may remember that I first launched my blog in June 2012 on a free platform called Blogger.
In 2015, I moved my blog over to Squarespace where it’s been for the last nine years.
Fast forward to today and I am so excited to finally be blogging on WordPress. Also, reveal the fresh, new blog design with you all.
What to expect from this relaunch
While Keep Calm and Chiffon has gone through many visual changes over the years, the one thing that hasn’t changed is my core mission.
I started this blog to share my perspective on fashion and beauty. Also, to help people easily navigate these industries without overwhelm through my weekly blog posts.
So while you’ll get to experience a brand new format and design for posts, the actual blog content will remain the same.
I’m excited to continue to create posts about style, skincare, travel and everything in between!
Why I ultimately switched to WordPress
Ultimately, I realized that self-hosted WordPress was the better platform for blogging as I ran into some issues with my blog on Squarespace over the years.
I still have two other websites on Squarespace—my portfolio site austentosone.com and my podcast website createandconsumepodcast.com.
If you’re looking to start a portfolio-type website and blogging will not be a priority for you, I think Squarespace is still a great option.
However a few of the things that weren’t working for me on Squarespace that are resolved by switching to WordPress include:
- More control over website and content: by creating on self-hosted WordPress I truly own my content
- Faster site speed and load times: sometimes larger images would slow this down with no solution outside of manually resizing things, whereas on WordPress this is as simple as installing a widget
- No site search indexing issue: I ran into this issue with broken search with Squarespace in the beginning of 2023 and it still hasn’t been resolved—I even had to install Google Programmable Search on my own as a temporary fix
- Better mobile capabilities: long load times and weird line break issues on Squarespace were increasing my bounce rate
- Ability to add author bios: I was told I would have needed to upgrade from Squarespace 6 to version 7 to accommodate this but I think in the age of artificial content, author bios are extremely important
I also like that WordPress has now switched to a block editor and is more similar to Squarespace with a drag and drop layout (one of the reasons I had historically preferred Squarespace).
The new blog design
I also wanted to take advantage of all of the incredible independent designers who create beautiful WordPress themes and completely remake the website to be more cohesive and editorial-looking.
I chose a theme from CreativeHer for my blog (a recommendation from my friend Caitlin) and I absolutely love the look of it.
My goal was to make the blog feel elevated and multi-dimensional. I felt my previous blog design while technically clean and minimal was pretty flat.
Even with a new design, I wanted to prioritize the user experience. I want to make it super easy to do that and I feel like this theme accomplishes that.
Pages with brand new designs
The blog categories that you know and love will look pretty similar to how they once did on Squarespace. However, there are a few completely re-imagined pages of my blog I wanted to spotlight.
The Home Page
The hub of my blog now features a much cleaner layout. The recent posts easily accessible at the top, the most popular posts highlighted below that and an easy navigation section down at the bottom of the page. It can help you find more of what you’re looking for.
Shopping
Easily find my favorite beauty products, fashion items and latest shoppable posts, all in once place.
Partnerships
If you are reading this and work for a brand who is interested in partnering with me, my brand new partnerships page allows you to dive deep into my previous brand collaborations and see examples of what type of content we can create together.
Holiday
And last but not least, I have a brand new holiday hub. It features all of my festive blog posts, shoppable gift guides and everything you need to get in the spirit.
I hope you get a chance to browse everything and check out all of these new updates! I’d absolutely love to hear your thoughts so please let me know what you think in the comments down below.
yours,
Austen
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