New Buttons (For the Blog)

If you're like me and read most of your blogs in a feed-reader, you don't often actually SEE the changes made on actual blogs unless the blogger mentions it. Well, I've recently made a few changes to mine that I've been wanting to make for ages so I thought I'd mention it as well as how I did it. (Oh, and it's mostly button additions, you know how I like buttons! ;)  )

The first change I made was to clean up the social media buttons on my right sidebar. If you remember, they looked something like this.

Ewwwww!

And I was able to re-vamp that into this.

Ahhhhh!

Fabulous right!? I'm guessing some of you might want to know just HOW I was able to do it. Well, with the help of the following.

1. This post from My Favorite Things on how to add social media buttons. There are actually many, many posts out there similar to this one, but her instructions seemed the most clear and easy-to-follow. 
2. The links at the bottom of this Moms Make Money post. The post itself has a video with instructions on adding the links if you want, but I just needed some free social button images. (The last link with the cute color icons was the one I used.) 
3. Photobucket. Basically, that's where you save your social button images so that you have an online link in order to put them into the code.

That's all I REALLY needed to get the changes made, but let me admit the last resource I used

4. (optional) My own limited knowledge of how to work with HTML from my time working at a website design company (though I just wrote the copy for the websites, I DID NOT write the code.) As well, my husband is a software programmer/coder extraordinaire and was able to help me get the buttons cooperate just the way I wanted them to.

Now, that's not all the changes I made.

• I also added a widget so that you can follow the CraftyHope blog by e-mail. I know that is becoming a popular option lately. Check out the widget just above my new flashy social media buttons on the right. This was super easy to add in Blogger. 
• From your Blogger drop-down menu select Layout
• In Layout mode, you'll see several buttons in the middle of the screen that say "Add a Gadget", click that.
• A new window will pop open. Scroll down the list in that window until you see "Follow by Email" and click into that.
• From there, it's as easy as clicking save and making sure the Gadget is placed where you want it on your blog layout. DONE!
• A reply button was also added to my comments section. I've actually been trying to figure out a way to add this little button for MONTHS and finally found this post from Spice up Your Blog that made it way simple to do.

Anyway, that's all the changes so far. I know there are a few others I want to make, but I'm so happy right now just to have gotten rid of some of the clutter that was plaguing my sidebar.

For a final dose of pretty, I listed these earrings today!

Unique Delight Earrings

I hope I was able to help you add some pizazz. . .or just some more buttons. . .to your blog also.