Welcome to the Offbeat Bride redesign!

When Offbeat Bride was first designed in 2006, it was structured as a book promotional blog. As we all now know, the site has evolved into something quite different over the past 3+ years, and so I decided it was finally time to overhaul the site's design in a way that better fit what it has become.

Now with a new look!

Ok, so the first thing you notice is obviously ... IT LOOKS DIFFERENT! Shout out to my designer Iris for making the magic happen. While I wanted to keep the same noir feel to the site, we did some major tweaking with things. It should feel pretty familiar in terms of where things are, but we made it more clear what was what. For instance, the "Advice" tab on the old site has always been just a link to the archive of Advice blog posts, and now it's clear which of the tabs are blog post filters — from the BLOG tab, you can view posts by Advice, Wedding Porn, Vendors (which includes shopping posts), and DIY (ooh, new category!), and Local. And ooh: how sexy is that featured post module at the top of the homepage? I'll be using it to feature the best of OBB, past and present.

Now with more category common sense

In an effort to make it a bit easier to find content that you like, we've done some cleaning up in the categories — we've broken Wedding Porn out into Decor, Fashion, Favors, Flowers, Food, Venues, and Invitations.

We've also broken Real offbeat weddings out into regions: Western, Midwest, Northeast, and Southern US; and then Canada and Global.

Oh and we added an icon for each category, so at a glance you can get a feel for what's what.

Now with comments that actually work

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I recently wrote about ditching IntenseDebate Comments, the system I'd been using for Offbeat Bride comments. Now that we're back to WordPress comments, things, well, actually work. You can still sign up to get notified of comments by email, and now everyone can edit their comments! We'll be adding more commenting features in coming weeks — stuff like Facebook Connect so you can comment using your Facebook account, and Report Comments so that you can tell us when you see something spammy, bitchy, or otherwise shady.

Now with more SQUEE! ...and a few bugs

I encourage y'all to click around and get a feel for all the new awesomeness. As you do so, I'm sure you'll find little things that are, uh, less than awesome ... as in slightly broken. We're probably going to be cleaning up on Aisle Offbeat Bride for a couple weeks, so please do let me know if you see something wonky. Redesigning a site with over three years of archived content makes for some major challenges, and while we've tried to catch most of the bugs, I'm sure we missed some.

But mostly — YAYAYAYAY! You're looking at months of hard work, and I'm so excited to finally be able to share it with y'all!

Oh, and one last thing: if you're thinking to yourself, ZOMG I HATE IT, give it a week to settle in. (We're still working on stuff!) If you still hate it, then let us know what's bothering you.

UPDATE

Thanks to everyone for all your feedback! It means a ton to me that y'all feel so passionately about the site that you're willing to take the time to share your thoughts with me! Ultimately, of course, the site's redesign is not going to be to everyone's liking, but we're working to integrate some of the suggestions y'all provided.