Isn’t she lovely!

I love love love my new design, and I big red puffy heart the one who designed it for me!  Darcy, at graphically designing worked all hours of the night, sometimes till the break of dawn to appease the former designer in me {oh how I miss her so}.  She took my demands napkin drawings and brought them to reality on my blog.  I told her I wanted a clean, uncluttered space and that is just what she gave me… I cannot speak highly enough about her mad designing skills and she is hil.ar.ious to boot!

{scroll over the nav bar… aren’t those birds cute as the dickens!Thanks to Lisa for helping with that!}

Let me tell you a little about why I chose to redo my blog, and what is in store for Especially Heather. As you can tell, I have taken down the “Advertise Here” link and will not be offering any advertising on my blog except for those who have already paid me this year (Bellaplex and Kidney Cancer Symptoms links in the sidebar). Once those have expired I will be essentially ad free. There are many reasons that I have come to this decision, but the one that I want to talk about with you is that I do not want anyone to be under the assumption that I blog about my cancer journey for money. I blog from my heart, not to fill my wallet. {That is not to say that other bloggers who have paid ads on their sites do not blog from their heart.. this is just my personal conviction} My husband has a great job {although slow right now- but atleast he has a job, right!} and we are doing okay financially. The main reason I put up the blog ads was because everyone else was doing it…

& I don’t want to be like everyone else, so I chose to take them down.

On to the next thing. Remember that survey that I asked you guys to take? It gave me so much input on what you, as my readers like and dislike; what you want more of and what you could do without. If you notice, I have done away with the tag cloud and brought back the categories. That was the biggest thing that you said in the survey. Also, I have gone through my blog and pulled out the most popular posts and some of my (and your) favorites.

My mahvelous designer showed me how to sign up for Google Friend Connect (I am serious when I say I didn’t know what on earth that was) so now you and I can be Google Friends, and thus we can be connected even more than we already are

Speaking of Connecting.. I have also done away with my contact page. Darcy and I discussed it, and it is just one more unnecessary click. {See, I’m thinking of you guys!} You can email me using that little handy dandy red envelope in my sidebar after the rss feed, facebook and twitter icons {click on those too if you haven’t already}

And finally, Darcy made me a nifty little button for you to put on your site if you so choose. {Just grab the code and put it on your blog where ever you want.}

Thank you for all of your input on my bloggy purpose survey, it really helped me in the process of redesigning and decluttering my blog!

{ And if you are looking for a new clean space for your blog to reside, Darcy is your girl! }