• New email and social media buttons now appear in the upper right corner of every page, and sparkling new navigation buttons can be seen along the left side.
• New Online Request an Appointment feature! At this time you are invited to use this new online appointment request feature to request General or Medical Intuitive Readings or Energy Work only.  Pre-Birth Planning Readings still require special handling – use the Contact Staci page to send your request directly to Staci by email.
• New page content and a New Page  – Some pages have new content: Your Soul’s Plan, Testimonials and About Staci. And aren’t you smart – you’ve already noticed the brand new News and Events page because you’re reading it right now!

The new ONLINE scheduling system is live and launched! A year in the making, this new online scheduling system speeds up the process of booking your appointment quickly and securely. Look for the sky-blue buttons in the upper right corner of every page, and the Request An Appointment with Staci links scattered elsewhere throughout the site. At this time you are invited to use this new online appointment request feature to request General or Medical Intuitive Readings or Energy Work only. Pre-Birth Planning Readings still require special handling – use the Contact Staci page to send your request directly to Staci by email.

Design matters

Sometimes writers think that design and communication are separate. That it’s the writer’s job to communicate with well-chosen words, and then the designer’s job to “make it pretty.”

Design is actually much more important than that.

The right design doesn’t just look good. It actually communicates something important to your readers.

• Good design conveys your authority. Professional design shows your commitment to your audience, and that you aren’t some “fly by night” who slapped a site together.
• Good design enhances your content without drawing attention away from it. You don’t want your readers to say, “what a great-looking design.” You want them to say, “what a remarkably useful blog, I’m going to read this every day.”
• Good design allows you to highlight what matters most to you. Clean, open design with plenty of white space allows the ads and images you choose to stand out on the page.

Good design always serves the needs of the project. A wonderful theme for a photography blog would be the wrong choice for most writers. A craft shop owner has very different needs from a real estate agent.

Smart theme design takes into account what you’ll be using your site for, and supports your purpose beautifully.

You want some flexibility

Even though you may not consider yourself primarily a designer, you still want some flexibility.

Maybe your readers prefer a larger font. Maybe you have a gorgeous custom header and perfectly shows who you are and how you work. You probably have certain colors you’ve chosen to reflect your individual brand.

That’s why we built design controls into Prose. What are design controls? They let you change simple things about the appearance of your site (like colors and fonts) without knowing anything about coding, PHP, CSS, HTML, or any other abbreviations.

If you can click and drag, you can customize Prose.

But that doesn’t mean images aren’t important, or that they’re just decoration.

The old cliché about a picture being worth a thousand words has some real truth to it. Why? Because images can create an instant emotional response.

The image you choose might convey a sense of calm, or love, or humor, or outrage. And it can do all this in under a second, creating an emotional “backdrop” for your content.

Adding images is easy

Just click the image icon on the WordPress dashboard, and in under a minute you’ve added a great-looking image to your post. (You can find hundreds of thousands of images at the inexpensive stock photo houses, or choose from the incredible variety of images available through the Creative Commons license.)

Don’t like how it looks on the left side? Takes two more seconds to align it right or center instead, or to add a caption.

By the way, did you know that image captions are some of the most-read elements of any web page? You can use captions for humor, to add clarity, or to reinforce your key points. Or if you prefer, you don’t have to have a caption at all. It’s completely up to you.

Adding a caption is easy, you just enter a few words in the “caption” field when you upload your image, and a frame and caption are added automatically.

Develop a visual “brand” with your images

Grrr! We're spiky!

Instead of the cheerful sunflower image I used at the top of the post, what if I’d chosen an image of spiky Venus Flytraps? It would change the mood from mellow to edgy in an instant.

Over time, the types of images you choose will become part of your brand. They’ll work with your words to convey all of the value your content has to offer. Along with your well-chosen words and the sleek design of your site, your image choices will become part of your unique identity — and part of what makes you stand out among the rest.

(Genesis is the theme framework, and Prose is what’s called a Child Theme.)

So what’s a theme framework, anyway? And why is it a good thing for your blog?

Here’s the scoop:

When it comes to web design, form and function need to be separated

In other words, how your web page works (what are sometimes called “back end” elements, like the code that Google analyzes to figure out your search engine placement, or the security code that keeps evildoers from hacking your blog) should be separated from how your web page looks.

Why? Because those back end elements need to be updated from time to time. Security evolves, SEO evolves, WordPress evolves, and your page function needs to grow with those things so that everything works the way it should.

But the last thing you want is for your carefully designed web page to suddenly look completely different because you updated your WordPress theme.

That’s the beauty of a framework. When you click that button to update Genesis, it automatically takes care of all of those security and SEO issues for you. But it doesn’t touch the design of the page, because that’s handled by “child themes.”

OK, so what’s a child theme?

So, the framework handles all the stuff you don’t see — the SEO, the security, etc. It also handles things like making your plugins work the way they’re supposed to. The theme framework is all about how the site works.

The child theme is in charge of how the site looks. The colors. The layout. The typefaces.

The child theme controls the “look and feel” of your site. And the exact same content will have a very different feel depending on how that content gets presented.

The nice thing about child themes is that with the Genesis framework, you can change them in just minutes.

That means you can take a funky site with a handmade flavor, like our Bee Crafty theme, and in about two minutes you can give that site a sleek professional gloss by switching to the Enterprise theme.

And you’ll never touch the important “behind the scenes” code that make your site work exactly the way you want it to.

The biggest security hazard for most blogs

Unfortunately, bad guys are everywhere, and blogs get hacked every day.

The most common culprit? Bloggers who haven’t updated their theme or their WordPress installation because they’re worried it will mess up the look and usability of their sites.

Outdated software is a major security hazard. One of the key reasons Brian Gardner developed the Genesis framework in the first place was to make updating his theme code one-click-easy.

When it’s easy for you to update your WordPress theme (and your version of WordPress) and you don’t worry about anything breaking, you’ll do it more quickly. And that keeps your blog (and your readers) safer from hackers.

Let’s sum it up: why frameworks are better

• The framework-and-child-theme model is more secure.
• It allows for better, cleaner code (which helps your SEO).
• It keeps plugin compatibility issues under control.
• It lets you change the look of your site virtually instantly, without breaking anything.
• And it lets the theme framework adapt as SEO and other factors evolve

So in case you were wondering why Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, said “Child themes are the only way you should build your WordPress site on top of a framework … ,” well now you know.