Nearly six years ago, I decided to start a blog to document my crochet adventures and love of amigurumi! I chose the name “All About Ami” and used the blog platform tumblr since they offered many free templates and the platform was very user-friendly. I was happy with my time on tumblr, but it was always a challenge trying to add different components to my blog since my knowledge of html is limited.
I chose a new template a couple of years ago and hired a designer (Leonora of Yellow Heart Art) to design a new logo, header, and welcome button. This is what my blog looked like for the past couple of years!
About half a year ago, I decided to make the big move from tumblr to WordPress as WordPress gives a lot more freedom and options, and is a better fit for how I blog. I was unsure of how to transfer all my content as it seemed like a very daunting process, but I discovered the site “Blog Wranglers” who specialize in moving blog content from one platform to another. I contacted the owner, Jim, and he was very helpful in explaining how they would do it as they had much experience moving content from Blogger, Blogpost, Tumblr, and other sites to WordPress . While I was at it, we decided to totally redesign the blog to make it more image-focused and so that you could see more projects at a glance. Ryan and I outlined what we wanted, and Jim and his team worked hard to bring our vision to life with our brand new, user-friendly blog! One of the biggest changes I wanted to make was a gallery for my patterns instead of a long list compared to before!
First off, you’ll notice the scrolling Featured Blog Posts bar at the top of the home page! I love how I can highlight certain posts as it’s one of the first things you’ll see when you visit my blog!
Each blog post is now an icon where you can see the featured photo and a brief description of what the post is about. Towards the bottom, you’ll see “Most Popular” posts of the Month and Year- currently these posts are not actually accurate (i.e. not the most popular posts of that month or year) but hopefully it will be once we begin pulling in the new data. You can also find the “Best of All About Ami” section towards the bottom, which are my most popular blog posts of all time. This is a great way for people to discover older blog posts that might get lost!
I am incredibly happy with my “Patterns” section! When you click the Patterns page of my navigation bar, you’ll be taken to this page where you’ll see pictures of all my patterns.
I have divided all the patterns into 4 categories: Amigurumi, Wearable Items, Household Items, and Knit. If you click on each heading, you’ll be taken to that specific section. Within each section, you’ll see two categories: “My Designs” and “Inspiration”. “My Designs” are the projects that I myself designed and have provided patterns for. “Inspiration” projects are ones that I’ve made using OTHER people’s patterns. I always link to the patterns and have usually provided step-by-step pictures detailing the process.
I love the clean look of my new blog and how there are so many images on the front page! Each blog post itself also allows greater image size compared to tumblr, and I love how you can see the pictures more clearly!
11 of my most recent blog posts can be found on the home page, and if you want to see ALL the blog posts (all 64 pages of them), you can either click the “More” button at the bottom of the blog posts or click the “Blog” tab in my navigation bar.
During the content transfer from tumblr to WordPress, some of the images did not load if they were “Gallery” or “Photo” posts from tumblr. Also, many of my posts did not have titles as I would simply post an image of a sneak peek on tumblr. I am slowly working my way through these posts by adding titles and main images, but it will take me quite a while since there are over 630 posts! Please be patient and bear with me as you’ll come across posts with no pictures (the icon will just show my logo as seen below) or titles (it will read “Needs Title”) if you go through older pages of my blog. I’ve already sorted ALL my patterns into the correct categories, so you can check them all out!
Currently at the time of publishing this blog post, there are still some alignment issues and we are also working on transferring all the Disqus comments from previous blog posts onto my new WordPress site! Thus, we are still working out some items, but we are delighted with our sleek new design and hope you love it too! I want to extend a huge thank you to Jim and his team at Blog Wranglers who helped us carry out our vision and bring our design to life! Let us know what you think in the comments below! We’ve been working on this new blog design for the past 6 months, and we’re so excited that it’s finally live!
