Welcome!

Say hello to the new Selective Potential! I’m so excited to finally be launching. It’s been hours and hours of work of rebranding, moving all past content (over 6 years!) and creating new pages and ways for you to easily navigate content! I decided to make the switch from Blogger to Squarespace. Blogger served me well for years, but it just stopped updating in 2011. It's a very outdated platform. It's kind of sad that I'm so thrilled over things like dropdown navigation, categories, heading styles, carousels, widgets... the possibilities are now endless! I worked around the clunkiness of Blogger for years, mostly with HTML coding, which was always a pain. I'm really excited about making the switch, and having added functionality and saving more time!

As for branding, I kept my overall design very similar to the past one. I'm sure it will evolve, but this made me feel comfortable to switch over. Baby steps! I knew I wanted to keep a sidebar design for advertising, social media and a few essential widgets. When I decided to switch platforms, I thought I'd also take a look at my branding as well and make a few minor adjustments. I stuck with my basic color palette, simplifying it down from five colors to three. I decided to refresh my logo too. The last one was very 'nautical' and as much as I love lighthouses, I had outgrown the cutesy anchor logo. Going along with the 'simplification' of my life, I wanted something that will reflect any direction my blog chooses to go in the future.

Here are a few new features:

  1. New way to browse outfits. Instead of a long scrolling page of posts that were tagged ‘outfits’ before, now you can view all of my outfits at a glance and click through to read more. So awesome!
  2. My travel section will expand. If you hover over travel, you can click through to a state. Currently, Michigan is the only state I’m featuring, but stay tuned! My Michigan page is very similar to my last one, but just so much easier for me to update. It’s automated! It’s still categorized by region as well to make it easier to plan trips, and you can click through to read more about the spot I visited.
  3. Sponsor page is updated… with three ways to collaborate together outside of basic sidebar advertising. These are all things I’ve done in the past, but hopefully this makes it easier for a brand to see how I’m able to work with them.
  4. New shop section with two ways to shop! If you hover over shop, you can choose to either shop by product, which is categorized by products featured on the blog, a wishlist, my everyday beauty essentials and home decor items currently in my apartment. You can also choose to shop my closet, which will take you to an outside service.

I hope you enjoy the new layout and the easier way to navigate what you're looking for! If you have any tips/concerns, feel free to leave me a comment or shoot me a note. There are still some tweaks I'm working through. Past Disqus comments have not been migrated over yet, and direct links from the past might be broken. If you link to my blog in your blogroll, it should still work fine. But if you link to a specific post in the past, it might be broken. I'm still also testing Feedburner and Bloglovin, to make sure my posts are successfully coming through to your feeders. In the meantime, make sure you're following on social media for updates.

Thank you for continuing to support Selective Potential! I'm excited for this layout to launch me into the new year, with fresh content, outfits, recipes, travel + lifestyle posts. 2016 is going to be good!

Tieka KnightComment