Welcome to the NEW Cotton Cashmere Cat Hair!

Things probably look REALLY different around here! After thinking about making a major change for the past couple of years, I finally buckled down and did it. It took longer than I was anticipating, and the horizon was getting brighter when I finally made it to bed last night/this morning, but it’s DONE! Yay! Welcome to the new site! I hope you love it. I thought I’d share everything that’s new! 🥳

A brief background: I started blogging in the fall of 2013 on my first style blog, Twenty-Something Simple, a free Wordpress.com site (it still exists, but every link is being forwarded here!). I rebranded to Cotton Cashmere Cat Hair and moved everything to Squarespace in June 2015. Since then, I made only a few cosmetic updates here and there. It’s been past time for a complete overhaul, and that’s what I accomplished these past few days!

What’s New on Cotton Cashmere Cat Hair

TEMPLATE

By far the biggest change is that I fully updated my site template! I had been on the same template since I moved to Squarespace 7 years ago, and I’ve been wanting to change it for at least the last two years but it’s a lot of work! I also couldn’t commit to any other template.

In early June, I learned about Big Cat Creative while browsing Pinterest, and I fell in love with their affordable templates right away, especially one in particular: Luna! I purchased it a day or two later and here we are. (Squarespace doesn’t have true custom templates like other platforms; the styling you see is built on top of the Brine template. I learned so much about Squarespace functionality while putting my site together!)

All of the brand photography you see on the site was shot by Rachel Wolf Photography last August (hence the long hair)! I’m so happy that I’m finally able to use more of those photos.

LOGO

I added my old black handwritten logo two years ago, and it was fine but I was ready for something a little more streamlined! I’ve always been a fan of the sans serif/script font duos and really love how it came together. The cat is probably my favorite part! I also updated the favicon (small icon in the browser tab) but may mess around with that more.

NAVIGATION

I consolidated my navigation substantially in an effort to streamline things. I got rid of all of my individual spring, summer, fall, and winter outfit pages and stuck all those outfits onto one page, Outfit Ideas. It’s a lot more mobile-friendly and easier to scroll through! I also added other groups to the page: workwear and travel outfits, so you can see all outfits in one place! I also made slight updates to the posts that are displayed on the More Style page.

It was more difficult to consolidate my posts that fall under the Life category because I blog about so many random things, haha. I consolidated my work- and grad school-related posts to the Work + Grad School page because there wasn’t enough content to warrant two different pages. On the new Life at Home page, I added beauty (which was previously on the More Life page) and my cats. On the More Life page, I added a collection of my personal posts. I might modify these; if I find myself searching often for particular posts, I end up including them on some page so I don’t have to go looking for or Google them every time!

I also pulled my Idaho page out to the main navigation because I’ve been focusing quite a bit of content on those topics and plan to continue that!

HOME PAGE

I think I created my old home page about a year ago (and before that, my home page was the first page of my blog), and it’s been working out great! The template I purchased has a different style home page, so that’s what you see now. It’s definitely more built for service-based businesses. I might modify it so you can find more of my content on the home page. I had a lot of fun choosing the colors!

SIDEBAR

Because the Brine template doesn’t have a sidebar on the blog post pages, I purchased a sidebar “plugin” from SQSP Themes. (I believe that Squarespace “plugins” are different than Wordpress plugins because they are all third party…but I also haven’t been on Wordpress to know how those plugins work ha.) My new sidebar is working like a dream! You might see some slight modifications as I finalize it (and I still need to figure out how to increase the spacing between the blog post and the sidebar), but I’m so happy this was available as an option.

Updated about and contact pages

My About page is also new (though the text is mostly the same as it was before), and the Contact page got a small refresh.

As you probably gathered from what I wrote, I’m not completely done with a few minor updates I want to make, but the big stuff is done! Please let me know if you come across anything broken, or if there’s something you have trouble finding. As always, thank you so much for reading! I appreciate you more than you know. 🤗