Elisa Pyykkönen

Blog design and blogging

My role

Content creator, front-end developer, designer, photographer.

About this Project

Keep Changing Colours blog has been my little corner of the internet from 2014 till this day. I wanted it to reflect me and make the layout different than regular blogs, but I didn’t want it to look like the usual goth/alternative blogs either, which usually rely on tacky black and red/purple colour scheme, keeping mind that it’s still easy to use and welcoming for my target audience.

Tools for blogger layout editing are very restricting and editing an existing layout design has proven to be a bit challenging. I’ve been thinking of making the layout from scratch but as the blog is my hobby and the content of the blog is more important than minor layout issues. I’ve settled with this solution of using a ready made layout which I heavily edited with blogger tools and by adding some fundamental elements to the HTML (like previous post -buttons).

The blog has been a very good place to improve my writing and English skills as well as to network. On 2020 I formed a conversational group for like-minded bloggers on Discord and it now has 10 participants. Blogging also keeps me doing what I like, for example crafting, photographing and drawing, for I have a place to showcase my achievements.

The audience is small and I'd like to keep it that way. My posts usually get around 1 to 5 comments and some personal messages, even though the followers count is low. So the engagement is quite good though. I do not make any co-operational or paid promotional posts.

What I learned

Having a blog has taught me how important is to have a place to share your works and hobbies, and to get comment and praise for them. This encourages to make more and to learn more. Also, having a like-minded group of people to talk to is important and blog is a good way of finding these people when your hobbies evolve around things that can be shared using images.

As for a content creation point, blogging has taught me a lot: what to share or not to share, the image and text ratio, what kind of content is interesting and it has also furthered my image processing skills and my writing skills. It has also casually introduced me to the world of Google Analytics.

Blogger as a platform on the other hand is relatively hard platform for making changes to the UI design.