New Design and a Clean Slate

 
Welcome to the newly redesigned Kitchen Conundrum!  As with many things, sometimes things happen. Some are intentional, while some are not, and sometimes you’ve just been thinking about something and then something occurs and that just jumpstarts the whole process.  That’s exactly what happened with this redesign.

I had full intentions of posting every day for NaBloPoMo. (Really!) That was until I tried to log in to the Dashboard after returning from Spain only to find that my password had been changed and my site hacked.  I had two kinds of security on my site too. WTH? How did this happen?

I may never know.  But I ended up having to pay GoDaddy to roll back my site as far as they could (just 30 days) because as luck would have it, my backups were corrupted as well.  Of course the roll back was not far enough back either and I ended up cleaning up a lot, A LOT! of bad code. After working into the wee hours many nights in a row and having to get up for work, I gave up and paid Sucuri to clean up the rest of the code and to monitor my site. They also provide several other services and if you’ve ever had your site hacked, they would be a good service to look into.  In addition, I added Wordfence Premium security, and implemented country blocking. Sorry, too many hacking attempts from IP addresses in certain countries that shall remain nameless.

So, it’s been four years since I started this blog and it has seen a few changes over the years but I thought it was time for a real facelift.  Not just a color change. So while I was working on the cleanup (which included removing a lot of old files from my hosting account too), I decided it was time to do just that.

I moved from my original Thesis theme, where every change took a long time with hooks and more HTML and CSS than should have been necessary to this new lighter framework, Genesis, which still requires a little bit of coding here and there but it’s not nearly as labor intensive.  I’ve incorporated a new, sleeker design (Foodie Pro by Shay Bocks) that boasts a lot less clutter both on the inside and on the outside.  I’ve worked on Genesis sites before and I really like how user friendly their framework is. It does still have some quirks but there are easy “workarounds” and they have excellent support.

The site is still a work in progress,  I hope to have the gallery page up and running this week and clean up any errant pages and posts that still may be a bit out of whack (like photos that didn’t transfer with posts). Over all though, it’s essentially done. A few tweaks here and there but nothing earth shattering or too time consuming.

But with all that out nearly of the way, the best part is that I have several posts coming up featuring some amazing cookbooks I’ve read this year and recipes I’ve created.  Not to mention, places I’ve been. It’s been quite a busy year! I hope you will stop back and catch up.

 

*These are affliate links. I only recommend them because I actually use them.