Hi friends,

It’s been awhile!

Since January I have been working to rebrand and redesign the Chic Steals brand and website into something that reflects who I am now and what I’m passionate about.

I have struggled with what to do with this website for over a year, initially posting here about taking a break to reassess things, and then here about whether to quit or continue a blog that didn’t reflect my interests anymore. In short, I felt Chic Steals was no longer a reflection of who I am now. Specifically, I have moved away from constant trend-following, fashion acquisition, and “stealing” ideas to make carbon copies. I’ve found that sometimes what’s cheapest doesn’t always last.

DIY’ing is fun to an extent because it flexes that all-important creativity muscle…but I began to feel like if I’m going to take the time, energy, and resources to create something and add it to the world, it better be good – and be there for the long haul. I had begun to feel that I couldn’t serve my readers well, or continue to post about things that I felt were trivial and overly consumerist in the grand scheme of things. Plus, there was a lot of content that was hastily-photographed or written without a thought of what value I was adding to the world. As with a DIY project, if I was going to be putting energy into a blog and website, I wanted it to be something I was ultimately proud of, that helped people. Plus, with everything that has been going on in the U.S., I wanted to spend my time adding beauty to the world, not taking ideas, but ultimately adding value to all.

This whole rethinking of things was a long and arduous, soul-searching process, but I ultimately decided the only way forward with my website was to get ultra-focused on what I’m passionate about, get ultra-picky about what I post about, and become ultra-invested in the site and my readers.

So it required financial investment in getting better: an overhaul from the ground up, an entire rebrand, a huge content edit, and a complete redesign of my website.

And it’s been in the works for seven months now.

Finally we have reached the last few days of work, and launch is imminent. So here it is, the unveiling of my new website, brand, and goals:

Chic Creative Life.

Here are some of the changes you’ll see (I am updating the below as the switchover occurs):

Content

• Chic Creative Life is a lifestyle website and blog, focusing chic living (frugally), with a hefty dose of creativity. DIY and making things yourself will still be a focus, though I will be sharing more articles on advice for living your best, most creative, inspired chic life.
• Categories on the site have been consolidated from 175+ down to 11. Should make posts A LOT easier to find.
• I’ve paused email newsletter delivery for awhile as I was migrating from MailChimp to my new email delivery system and hooked into the new site. Getting this restarted may take a little time, but it is in the works, and if you signed up to receive Chic Steals blog content as a newsletter in the past, you will start to receive blog content digests from Chic Creative Life.
• You will have the option of also signing up for less frequent, targeted content updates from the site, including Spoonflower Fabric Designs, Decor Items Added to Decor Shop, E-Courses and E-Books, etc.
• I have retired a number of old posts because they no longer reflect the message I want to put out there.
• I have edited a number of old posts to be clearer or better written. There are still some photos that are missing from old posts. I’m working on restoring everything, but with 1900+ posts over 9.5 years it’s still a work in progress.

URLs

• ChicSteals.com and Chic-Steals.com will redirect to ChicCreativeLife.com (clicking now you’ll just see a preview page until CCL goes live)
• All my social accounts that are under the Chic Steals brand (Facebook Page, LinkedIn Page, Twitter) will change to ChicCreativeLife-branded, with URL’s reflecting this change (may be slightly different depending on what’s available at the time of switchover)
• Pinterest and Instagram accounts are under @carlyjcais and will not change
• I’ll be moving my blog in the back-end of Bloglovin’ so if you follow Chic Steals through there you will just see the name change in your interface, but your feed should not be interrupted.
• If you receive content via RSS Feed, you may need to update your subscription to http://feeds.feedburner.com/ChicCreativeLife
• My email will switch to carlyjcais@chiccreativelife.com (super-long, I know). My old @chic-steals.com email address will be deactivated – so don’t use that one if you actually want me to answer.

Design

• In short: better.
• The landing page of ChicCreativeLife.com will be a portal for blog content, fabric designs, shoppable home decor, and downloadables. Blog post index will live at ChicCreativeLife.com/blog but individual blog post-pages will still have the same slug as they did on ChicSteals.com, with no /blog preceding them.
  
• The DIY Gallery has been consolidated with rotating image carousels instead of an image-heavy gallery of all my DIY tutorials. Easier to scroll through and see.
• Many new pages have been added to showcase my fabric designs, my home decor designs, and my downloadable E-Courses and E-Books. Some items you can buy directly on my site through the Gumroad integration, some are hosted on other sites (Stars + stones fabric designs on Spoonflower, CarlyJCais home decor and artwork designs on Society 6).
• The mobile design has not been given the same amount of time and QA as the desktop version. If you are experiencing something strange on mobile, please let me know.

Phew! I think that’s it for now.

As we make the switchover, some links/feeds will get buggy. Image URLs might not be all there. Categories/Tags may be wonky. Posts from long ago may go missing. Social media channels may not all be connected or working properly. Contact forms may not be working. Emails may deploy. In other words, digital Armageddon may indeed happen with Chic Steals and embroil all of you in it.

But I’ll get it right soon… and everything will live at

Chic Creative Life

Hope to see you there!

xo

Carly

Tags: