The Green Familia Recycles Their Look

The Green Familia got a new look with an extensively customized Studiopress Lifestyle theme

For the past few months, I have had the pleasure of working on The Green Familia. Besides the fact that I simply love the purple and green color scheme, this project was an opportunity to add some really useful and fun features to a Studiopress site.

Brenda Cuby, the Owner of The Green Familia, wanted a new vibrant look for her blog. She worked closely with Sharon at Es-preso to get just the right look. Then it was time for me to step in and start doing some tweaking for functionality and features.

Tabbed widgets in the sidebar highlight lots of content in a compact area. The top tabbed area pulls a teaser of the latest featured post, as well as the most recent and the most read posts. Another tabbed area allows for links to favorite resources.

Another tweak was adding image links to the individual posts. These images invite visitors to share their favorite eco tip (via the contact form) or enter one of the current competitions.

A 125X125 ad section was added to the sidebar to monetize the blog. Besides graphical ads, this area can also display Google Adsense ads. A big plus is that these ads can be scheduled to start and stop on specific days.

Reader ratings, a poll feature, an animated tag clouds, video reviews, a newsletter sign up area, and links to Twitter and Facebook are just some of the additional features we added to the site.

One important part of this redesign was the organizing the navigation. Rearranging and recategorizing tightened up the navigation on the site and made things easier to find. Navigation is a critically important part of every site and taking time to work through the categories was time well spent.

I am so happy to have been a part of this project! You can browse through the site for yourself at thegreenfamilia.co.uk