We’ve been big on changes at House of Brinson, as you can see the blog has a new look and we’ll be sharing our new home with you in the next few weeks. I wanted to take a moment to blog about, well, blogging. I actually love the topic, but so many other bloggers cover it well. We started blogging over four years ago to work together as a husband/wife team plus blow off some creative steam and share what we love. Since the beginning of House of Brinson, the blog has grown more than we could have ever imagined. It’s still our place to share what we love, but we’re also going to take it to the next level. I believe we can do this gracefully, and I’d love your feedback along the way. Here’s some things we’ve changed:

• Blog Design: The blog has a new look. I focused on keeping to photography driven point of view of our design, but added my cleaner navigation and a side bar with our social media links. I admit to being my own worst client, designing myself (and Will, but he’s easy going about design details).

• Advertising: You probably noticed we added advertising. I know, I tried to hold out as long as we could! But in the end, I believe I came up with a design that didn’t interfere with the visuals, and maintained our clean, photography focused look. The advertising helps us cover costs to produce the blog. We hope to bring you posts that will be even more in-depth by lightening some of our production costs.

• Professional recipes: We love food, and love to share our recipes. I recently read the book Ratio and took a recipe writing class so we could write our recipes in an easy to understand way. The instructor for the recipe writing class had some of the best advice: Be kind to your readers. She’s so right. If you read our older recipes, it’s like I’m standing there hanging in your kitchen with you, rattling off a recipe from memory. I want to make sure the recipes stand alone, and if I can be there to hang out, even better!

• Click through to post: I know it’s a click, but wow, did we debate over this for hours. We want the photography on the home page of our blog to be worthy of either one of our portfolios. Scrolling through the posts to see what interests you is critical, and the visuals matter to us. We’ve wanted to post about certain topics but had an edit of 20 photos, and knew it was too cumbersome to scroll through the entire post on the main page. Now that we have each post contained, we’ll expand the story telling to a more casual style. Especially as we start doing home renovations. Some of this won’t be pretty, but you’ll want to see it. 🙂

• Shout outs: We worked with two people that we couldn’t have done with without. Joyce Manalo helped us with our content strategy and social media. She kept us on track, and made sure our story was apparent to everyone else as it was to us. We have a new about page with a quick video. Jonas Goslow did all of our programming and is an overall genius. He spent hours with us getting to know what’s important to us, and listening to me about not wanting to clutter up the pages, etc. and did an amazing job. He’s a thoughtful, multi-dimensional person who is a pleasure to work with. And of course, our summer intern Victor Tseng. He handled dealing with a husband/wife creative team with style and grace (and was amazing with Nero despite his slight licking obsession).

Blogging is a lot of work but we really find it rewarding professionally and personally, not to mention we love connecting with you. A few weeks ago there was quiet a hubbub in the blogging community when Martha Stewart said some things about bloggers, and she probably wishes she could hit that ‘undo’ button. Regardless of Martha, it really made me answer Martha’s question of ‘Who are these bloggers?’ and are we ‘experts’. I can answer that: we’re expert story tellers. We live in the digital world of folk storytelling, an age old tradition that we carry on in a digital format. We share our successes and failures, our best recipes, decorating and house hold tips, while weaving that information into the story of our lives. So that’s what we’re experts at: telling a story people want to listen to. Heck, some of us are professionals and it’s what we do for a living. Really, I could sit down with Martha and discuss this all day. I find the evolution of traditional print and digital fascinating. Frankly, I miss the days of Martha Stewart Living when we could see what collectable Fritz was obsessing over, or have Martha herself give us the ‘best’ recipe for what ever was happening that month.

I hope you enjoy what we have coming up in the next few months. I’m excited to share our journey with you, with all the twists and turns!