Tips and Tricks - Blogger Templates

During the 2nd Unofficial Crop Chocolate Blog Hop we had a few participants that were new to maintaining a blog so I answered a few of their questions. I thought that if I ever organized or co-organized a blog hop again, I would need these notes again so I'm pulling them out of my email and posting here. This is not meant to be "professional" advice for maintaining a blog nor a replacement for Blogger documentation as I do this for fun. There might be faster or "Blogger recommended" ways to accomplish the same tasks. These are the steps that work for me and the blog hop participants. Also, I am not a designer, but I've seen some great websites and blogs and I've seen some I'll never visit again so I offer some opinions about website and blogs that I find attractive.

Templates

I have only used the free templates here on Blogger. I do know that if you change your template after you get your page looking the way you would like it to look might change the location of items (widgets) you have already placed on your page so always preview your blog before saving the change.

Here's how to change your template:

1. go to the home page of your blog, log on if you are not already
2. look in the upper right corner for Design and click on it
3. look at the choices on the left side of the page and click on Template if it is not already orange
4. review the Template choices, when you see one you like, click on it
5. you'll see a preview of your blog with the new template; if you like it "as is" click Apply to Blog; if you want to customize it, choose Customize and you'll be able to choose different templates, add backgrounds (stock photos, your own photo or color), change width of the blog blog and/or sidebar, change the body and footer layouts and under Advanced, change fonts, font color, link color and many more)

No matter what you do with your template, please be sure your blog is readable. Fancy fonts are pretty, but use them in moderation. For a lot of text stick with one of the suggested fonts in the window where you write your post. Same with blinkies - who wants to have several icons blinking at them when they are trying to read your post. One of the templates I looked at would make great scrapbook paper or fabric, but I'm not sure I'd want to read much text from it. I know some people have hard time reading light color text on some backgrounds, e.g., white text on a light blue background.

One final note regarding Templates. If you see a blog you like, you usually can find the name of the template they are using by scrolling to the very bottom of their blog and get that information. For example, I am using "Picture Window template. Powered by Blogger."

That's all I have time for today. I hope this helps someone.