I always cite Lauren Luke as the inspiration for starting this blog, and I still stand firm on that. Lauren is just such an amazing and inspiring person, and she made me realise that I can't be the only person on the planet that is just discovering make up, and I guess I wanted to share my learning experiences with everyone.
Three things were occurring in my life at the time.
1. I was still in the very early stages of my career as a Freelance Writer, and I was desperately trying to find a niche.
2. I was getting absolutely sick of my oily, and red skin taking over my life, so I'd started doing research (online of course) into what products would be better for my skin
3. I was also getting incredibly sick of the jargon that product write-ups were full of, and I wanted to at least try to figure out what it all meant.
My experiences with the second two were ultimately, the thing that encouraged me to sit down and start writing, because as I said before, I was learning all this stuff, and I wanted to help others to have easier access to the information that at first, I had struggled to find. And so, beauty became my ultimate writing niche.
I've always had a bit of a love-hate relationship with both Wordpress and Blogger (notice that I've been an on-again, off-again member of Blogger for over two years), but I quickly decided that I wasn't really happy with Wordpress for a multitude of reasons. So, I made the decision to move it elsewhere.
Initially, I'd decided to move it to Viviti, which I did within barely weeks of setting up the blog. I can't entirely remember why I decided to move to Viviti, but it looked like this (can you believe I still have this image?):
As you can see I had the Dictionary idea running right from the beginning.
Nevertheless, by June 2010, I really wasn't feeling good about using Viviti, and I toyed with the idea of running an entire website dedicated to being a one-stop shop of beauty tips and information, and I designed a website over at Wix, which looked like this:
You can just about see, that by this stage I'd moved into offering tips!
I have to admit, that I was quite proud with the overall look of this website, which I should assure you took me a long time to piece together, but it began to feel like a lot of time was going into it, just because everything had it's own section, and maintenance was high. Plus, I didn't really find Wix to be that "user-friendly". It offered a lot of creative freedom, but I found it to be too fiddly. So, I decided that I would not launch a website, and so, the Kat's Beauty Reviews as you know it, here on blogger evolved.
Anyone who has been with me since the early days (thank you my lovelies!), will know that I have a habit of changing my layout. It's never a case of not liking my layout, I'm just fond of change for the sake of improvement. I'm a little disappointed that I don't seem to have any screen grabs of earlier Blogger layouts that I can show you, but I really hope that the one I have at the minute will be around for a while :)
I'm proud to say that, although I've had a few little breaks in the middle of writing this blog, I have always happily come back to it, and I absolutely love blogging, and getting to know some of you guys. I used to think that the beauty industry was "fake" and "superficial" and you have all helped me to realise that it isn't like that at all. I've done a lot of growing up over the past 12 months, I've learnt a great deal, and I hope that the next 12 months will be just as amazing.
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