Hello! If you’ve been reading this blog, you have probably noticed some changes around here. I’ve got a new look and new name.
When I first started blogging back in 2008, it was just a personal blog for family and friend updates. Around that same time, we purchased the domain name www.stephenandjessika.com for our wedding website. After the wedding, we no longer needed that site so I changed the blog to have that domain so it wouldn’t go to waste. We’ve had a lot of adventures along the way and I’ve been in and out of blogging and have had various websites sepereate of the blog (mostly for my photography business I had once upon a time). I purchased www.jessikareed.com for my photography portfolio a few years ago and after we made our big move from Utah to Alabama I wasn’t really doing much photography anymore. I decided to change my domain for the blog to my name.
It’s been almost a year since we moved here and I have learned a ton about blogging. I really love sharing creative things, that are quick, practical and affordable. I’ve heard for a while that if you want to blog more seriously you really need to be on wordpress. I’ve been on blogger but one of my past photography sites was on wordpress so I’ve been familiar with it. I’ve recently had some sucess (for me at least) with some posts being shared on pinterest, like this one and was dreading the migration and losing any of that progress. I was nervous and procrastinating but finally decided to stop reading about it and just do it for heaven’s sake. With that big migration and getting feedback that I’m hard to find online (since my name can be spelled so many different ways), I decided it was time to make a change to a little more generic name.
As you can probably guess, I settled on Hip and Simple. I have been compiling a list of ideas but nothing really felt right. I wanted something easy and memorable. Plus I don’t really have a niche, I share a mix of everything creative with a little personal added in, so it needed to be a little general.
There is a little bit of history with that name. My mom has always had a side craft thing since I was little. I grew up crafting with her and teaching classes of her designs – it’s where my creativity was born. At one point she decided to sell kits of her designs online. She came up with the name Hip and Simple. The first website I ever made was for her, I think I was 15 or 16. I wish I had some screenshots of what it looked like. I’m sure I’d cringe now but it would be fun to see. She used the name Hip and Simple for years until she got into the Twilight craze and a lot of her designs centered around that and she moved to Simply Bitten. She is back at her creative and awesome craft designs under a new name of The Orange Sofa – check out her Instagram feed here.
I joked that I should steal her old name and wrote it on my list. I couldn’t get it out of my head after that. The more and more I thought about it, the more I liked it and realized how perfect it was. I checked with my mom on her feelings about me using it and with her blessing decided to make the change. I’m really loving it and hope that it makes me a little easier to find.
I’ll be back at my regular creative posting soon enough but just wanted to let you all know what’s going on here and let you know that yes you are still in the right place! Thanks for reading and have a great day!
Leave a Reply