…without spending 6 months making coffee in the bathroom sink.

You may have noticed that I’ve been doing some organizing & redecorating in my kitchen of late. Well, it was only a matter of time before I turned my attention to the virtual kitchen, my home here at the Local Kitchen blog. Behold, the new design of Local Kitchen! A few changes:

• a new URL: http://localkitchenblog.com
• a new theme, with painfully-modfied CSS details by yours truly
• a cleaner header area, with custom banner photo and straightforward navigation menu
• a wider main column, for larger pictures and more readable type
• a new contact section in the sidebar, with multiple ways to keep in touch: email & email subscriptions, RSS feed, Twitter and Facebook
• a new Local Kitchen Facebook page: surf on over there and “like” the page so you can see blog posts & updates in your Facebook feed
• a more obvious Search box, so you can find what you need quickly & easily
• previous-post and next-post navigation at the bottom of each post
• threaded comments and a larger, easier to read comment section

There will be some additional changes coming in the next few weeks: updates & streamlining for some of the Pages, new & improved pictures for some of the older recipes, and (if I ever det it done) a full Recipe index.  I’m sure there are some bugs to work out: I’ve tested the new design on IE7 and Firefox, but not on other browsers, and I’ve been looking at the code for a week now, so it’s likely there is a mistake or two. Please feel free to surf around, take a peek at the new digs, and let me know what you think. Please do give me a shout in comments if you find any broken links, weird formatting, or anything that just looks off. I’d also love any feedback on readability, design, navigation, etc. I want the site to be beautiful as well as useful: I’m hoping this redesign gets me closer to that goal.