I wasn’t lying when I said I was working on a secret project. The project that I was working on was a design freebie giveaway. If you have subscribed to my website, then you knew this day was coming. I will be hosting my very first Logo Design Giveaway.

As you can see, I keep my promises. I do give away things for free. That’s right, it is important to subscribe to my website so you can be the first to know.

But Wait, there’s more…

This post isn’t where you enter to win the logo design giveaway. I wanted to share with you that the giveaway will be coming, soon. Basically I’m dangling this in your face to get your attention that the giveaway may be tomorrow. It may be Saturday, or it may be Sunday or it may be in another week. Only I know when I will be hosting the giveaway. What I will tell you is that I will be offering the giveaway within the next week. Oh the suspense.

There will be special rules to enter of course. One tip I can give you, is that your friends can also enter the giveaway on your behalf. This means that if you send 50 of your friends to enter the giveaway, and there are 100 entries, then you have a 50% chance of winning.

I’m giving you this specials heads up early so you can let your friends know that they too should probably subscribe and be instantly notified of when the Giveaway goes live.

Oh, you want to know why your friends should subscribe too?

What if your out and about, and you didn’t know the giveaway has been posted and you missed the most awesome opportunity to save yourself $150.00 in a new logo. I mean, what do you have to lose other than $150 that you could have received for free by entering my contest? Well, here’s my next secret tip..

I will close the entries on the giveaway at my discretion. That’s right, I’m not going to tell you when the giveaway expires until it actually does.

You really don’t want to sit on this. You want to give yourself the chance to win a free logo worth the value of $150.00, and you also want to let your friends increase your chances of winning, right?

So what are you waiting for?

Subscribe right now (over to the left), and check your inbox for the big logo design giveaway.

Before I open my design services to the public, I had to create a theme that I designed vs using another person’s theme. Lets face it, Thesis is great, but it didn’t have all the functions and design styles I specifically needed to add without having to jump through a bunch of custom functions. Sorry, that’s web design code talk. AKA geeky talk.

Lets get down to the pretty part and how to navigate this blog. Here’s a screen shot of the before and after.

The overall design is a little bit the same. It’s a box theme. I like boxes. I like clean and simple. Don’t you? I could design something more complex, but if I did that, then I would never settle on one design. I would keep designing multiple themes instead of settling on one theme design.

Lets talk about the navigation. I cleaned up the navigation to include pages that you are only interested in clicking on. There’s no more excess information in the navigation.

Instead of having a separate contact page just for an e-mail address, I’ve included the e-mail address with the social media icons.

I moved the sidebar to left of the blog per google’s recommendation for higher ad performance. You can find the information from google here. I plan on offering advertisement slots in the near future once Fall For Design grows. You can help it grow by subscribing once a new post is made. You can find the sign-up form to the left.

There’s a few other tweaks I made, but those are pretty easy to locate. IE, like the comment option on the top of the post and the bottom.

How long did it take for me to make this theme? It took me a month to learn WordPress design structure and php (sorry, geek talk again). Not to mention I did it during all my available time, which is very little. You can find out more on how I manage my time with a toddler and an infant by clicking here.

Have you gave your website a make-over lately? If not, subscribe to the left and get notified about design freebie giveaways. I can make your website over for free. Yup. Just because I’m cool like that. ;)

Since we’re down to one income for now, it’s important to me that I start learning how to coupon all over again. Yup, you guessed it. I jumped on the coupon wagon. Although I’m disappointed that couponing isn’t what it was like two years ago. I use to to go to Dillon’s and double my coupon along with an e-coupon. Now I have to use one or the other.

However Dillons was having a Mega Sale this week and I jumped on the opportunity. Almost everything they were selling were things we actually eat. Even if I didn’t have the coupon for the sale item, I purchased it anyways. I ended up saving almost $18.00 + by shopping at Dillons vs walmart. For example, I purchased Dillons bread for a $1.00 vs $2.29 at Walmart for Sara Lee brand. I also calculated that if we get our milk from Dillons every month, we will be saving $16 a month. $16 to us is a lot! Especially when we can make two casserole dishes for about $16.00. By making ht extra effort to budget wisely and to shop the sales, we’re already saving $32-$36 a month.

So what was my grand total of what I spent pictured above? Right under $100. Not bad, but I still rather be spending a lot less! I don’t think we can get our groceries down below $350 a month, but my husband would like for us to get it down to $200 – $300.

Lately I’ve been cruising Pinterest for some favorite casserole or big dish recipes to help keep the budget at a decent level. Last week was the first time I tried a Pinterest dish (White Enchiladas), and it was a hit! My goal is to keep trying a new dish every week to expand our menu of cheap affordable items to be able to reach our grocery budget goal.

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I know there’s plenty of websites out there that can help us with this journey. However each family is unique, and I certainly know that mine is. I know the general price of a food item with our local grocery store and I also know what my husband will and won’t eat for left overs, and what food my children eat.

Our next meal we’re going to try this week is;

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So what do you do? Do you have a budget that helps you? What are the cheapest meals that your family will eat?