Unveiling The New Tinsel & Tine
by Le Anne Lindsay, Editor
Come January 2020 Tinsel & Tine will celebrate its 10 Year Anniversary!
Covering Films/Movies, Food/Restaurants and Philly Events.
In all that time, I was using the free Blogger platform, it served my purposes, and well, it was free! But last year, it started slowing way down, taking a full 40 seconds to load and it looked so dated. Most people had progressed to a platform that took up the whole page and was cleaner overall.
And many Bloggers that I started out with had simply closed up shop. Early on, I had dreams of making Tinsel & Tine a business, perhaps PR or an online magazine or felt it would lead to another career in the entertainment industry – none of that happened. So, was it time for me to throw in the towel and pursue something more lucrative in my free time?
But then I thought, wait a minute, if I do that, I won’t see movies every week. I still LOVE the movie industry, talking about it, knowing about it, promoting movies and films, seeing as much as possible, interviewing, highlighting, going to Film Festivals etc…
And also, I still love all the art, theater, music and talent that abounds in this city, not to mention, I get invited to some really cool Philly events, food related and otherwise.
But more than anything, my decision to revamp the site rather than close it – I simply still enjoy T&T – communicating with subscribers, fellow critics, filmmakers, organizers, PR agents, having a reason to be on social media, taking great photos, the whole thing is incredibly time consuming, but still after 10 years, super fun!
This was the look of Tinsel & Tine for years. I was always planning to at least change the layout and color scheme, but never got to it.
The New Header ties everything together in a nice clean image
Now having a Featured Section for each category really changes the game in terms of catching visitor’s attention
I used to add some Coming Attraction Stuff to the old site, but there was no dedicated section
I love now being able to highlight the most recent or favorite posts!
The old site didn’t have any way of showing a thumbnail and preview text. All you used to be able to do is scroll down the last 7 posts on the home page.
My Film Festival Coverage used to get lost in between the movie reviews and foodie stuff. It was hard to direct visitors to a single page of only Film Fest posts. But now I have a whole landing page for only Film Festival related stuff
The Philly Spotlight page used to be just Facebook embeds piled in the same post, with no way to link to just one. Now, it’s more work, but I can highlight & recap events with style.
I started the #PhillyCalendar page on Tinsel & Tine a couple years ago, because I was being sent a number of press releases to things I didn’t have time to cover, but still wanted to spread the word. Plus, figured it would be a good draw for people to come to the site for Philly events and then stay for reviews and such, which worked
The page used to be a Google Calendar embed. It still syncs from there, for ease of populating and for users to add events to their own Google calendar, but the design of the calendar is now incorporated into the design of the site! When you click on an item, the details and links display… and MORE
Thank you for reading and checking out this new site. I’m pretty proud of myself for creating the design, but it would still just be a dream in my head without my web designer, Mitch Ian Greene doing ALL the heavy lifting and execution, not to mention, new logo design. He took a basic WordPress theme and tailored it to my specifications and I’m really happy with it ☺️
If you’re looking for a web designer, he can be reached at m.iangreene@gmail.com
Best,
Le Anne Lindsay, Editor
tinseltine
Tinsel & Tine provides year-round free promotion, sparking conversations and awareness, celebration and reviews of the movie industry - from local indie shorts to international films/filmmakers, to studio driven movies/moviemakers. Mixed with a spotlight on Philly Happenings. #MiniMovieReview #PhillyCalendar
4 Comments
tinseltine
Le Anne,
just saw your re-design post and wanted to say congrats! Looks fab!
I tried to leave the comment below a few times but get the message: “Blocked as suspected bot.” So I copied and pasted my comment for you to read here.
Very happy you will be continuing!
Congratulations my Blogstress friend!
The new design looks fab. I can relate to your thought process – I took off almost a year from blogging but found I really did miss it. So I came back, too. Some amazing connections and experiences have come about from this medium, and I am happy that you and I have shared so many of those fun times together. Looking forward to many more years of your film & food coverage.
xoxo
Doreen
Doreen Creede
STYLE MANIAC
215.429.2000
Dee
I am so excited for you! I can’t wait to check out the new Tinsel & Tine!
Julia Dent
I love the new look! Very fresh and clean!
tinseltine
Thank you so much! That’s exactly what we were going for 🙂