A Blog Tour

It was a long time coming, but I've finally compiled a simple, easy to follow blog tour so that you can understand where to find anything you want to find in this blog. A lot of people were complaining about how they couldn't find certain areas of the website, and that's because I was still working on them, or it's not noticeable on the front page. 

Let's start with the navigation bar that's below the blog headline.

• Home: Easy enough! Click it and it will lead you back to the front page where you'll see the latest posts.
• About: This will lead you to my bio page, giving information about how I started art journaling, and other interests that I have.
• Inspiration: This is the one I've been working on for a while! I just completed the page yesterday, so I hope you'll enjoy that new feature. This will lead you to the new Inspiration page where you have two buttons that will lead you to the inspiration you want to read: What Inspires Me, and What Can Inspire You.

Under "What Inspires Me" you'll find:
- Inspirational posts by other bloggers
- Favorite bloggers
- Favorite catalog magazines
- An inspirational music video playlist that's visually appealing.
- And other random inspiration


Under "What Can Inspire You" you'll find:
- Classes I've taken and class reviews
- A link to the new feature "Sunday Inspiration"
- And other tutorials that I've created

• Materials: Here you can find a list of my favorite materials that I use daily in my own art journal. Anything I list in there, I highly recommend!
• FAQ: This is where my Frequently Asked Questions are, so take a look here and see if your question has been answered already before contacting me.
• Contact: Here's where you'll find my contact info if you ever have a question or a request. But before you contact me, be sure to check the FAQ to see if your question has already been answered.

Now here's the one where I get the most questions. What are these buttons and where do they go? And where the heck is my Etsy shop?!

Well let me explain. Each square with a symbol in it takes you to that website. Do you recognize any of them?

1.) My Flickr Photostream - This is where I upload all of my images that I use on my website.

2.) My Twitter Account - You can see my profile and follow me through there.

3.) My Facebook Page for Awkward & Beautiful (Sorry for anyone who's tried to add me as a friend on my personal account, I like to keep that one strictly for local friends and family, with the very few exceptions.)

4.) My Pinterest Boards - If you haven't discovered Pinterest yet, it's an amazing inspiration website where you bookmark images and keep them in themed "boards" that you can share with friends. It's really helpful when you want to keep certain inspiration in certain groups. You can follow me there as well!

5.) Bloglovin' - A blog reader that I highly prefer over Google Reader, where instead of reading from the reader, you can actually visit the website that you've subscribed to while still being connected to the reader. You can sign up and follow my blog from there as well. You should really give it a try!

6.) My Youtube Channel - You'll find all of my videos here. Sorry I haven't made one in a while, I keep transferring to different computers, and it seems that each movie editor is different, and I can't get the hang of finding the correct way of editing my files! *sigh*

7.) My Tumblr Blog - "Life Can Be Awkward & Beautiful" is where I blog short and sweet little messages about what's going on in life at the moment when I don't have the time to create a long blog post here on my site. It's connected to my twitter, so when I update my tumblr, you'll be sure to see it in your twitter feed.

And last, but not least:
8.) My Etsy Shop - Here's the official link to my Etsy shop. It's funny that everyone was asking "Where's your etsy shop link?" "You really need a button that goes to your Etsy shop!", when it was right here all along. Sorry it was hard to find everyone.

I wanted to make the site simple and minimalistic, so I tried to clear out any clunky widgets and things that could clog up my sidebar and make it too long. And I like the drawn symbol approach. But I do have some buttons to other useful things, like these:



Pretty fancy stuff, huh? I'll be adding more of these as they pop up.

As for searching for a particular post, there's two different ways you can do so:


The first option is the tag system. I tag each of my blog posts with a topic for this sole purpose. So if you want to read anything related to my art journals, you can just click the "art journal" tag in this huge list. And the larger the word, the more I've used that tag, and vice-versa, the smaller the word, the less I've used that tag.

The second option is just looking up posts by date, which is the drop down list called "Search The Archives", it will list the years, and the months and will have the number of posts I've posted each month.

And I think that's it for the blog tour! I've explained everything to my full potential, but if you have any more questions either regarding the blog, my art journals, or anything else, you can ask in the comments, through email, or my formspring. I'd really like to update my FAQ section, so I'll answer your question to my best ability.

Hope you guys are having a great start to your week!
♥
Natty