New Template Design Feature on Blogger

One of the problems with Blogger has been that the default templates were looking rather tired and to customize them to your needs required a knowledge of HTML and CSS. However, those people at Google's Blogger team seem to have been listening to their users and have now brought out their new Template Designer.

I have decided to give it a go with my experimental blog. So clicking on to the design feature this is what you find.

To start with you find that you have six themes, each with a number of variations giving a total of 26 templates to start with. This does not feel like that many, but actually the big new feature is that the templates are now highly customizable without the need for any knowledge of HTML or CSS.

For the purposes of this little experiment I have decided to start with one of the "Simple" templates, which starts off looking like this:

Moving on, you can then choose a background and this is where the fun begins! You have the option here of simply changing your colours or changing background images. There are loads to choose from, although you need to bear in mind that how these are applied varies according to which template you have chosen, i.e. most will be applied as a background image, but for others they will be applied as a header.

For this exercise I have chosen a green bamboo background - probably not what I would choose if I was doing this for real, but let's give it a go and see how it turns out. At this point you also have the opportunity to change the colour theme to your blog as well. This is how it looks after applying the background.

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Now onto the layout stage. This is where the new Blogger Designer really gets going. Previously, unless you were happy to start editing the template HTML or you downloaded a template you were stuck with a standard width blog with one sidebar. Now you have no fewer than eight options ranging from zero to THREE sidebars. Here are the options available:

Not only that, you have the opportunity to adjust the width of your blog and of the sidebars.

Finally you then have the "Advanced" tab, most of which is actually not that advanced at all. In fact most of it is simply a replacement of the previous "Font and Colors" feature, but just a little more user friendly. However, what you do have here is an opportunity to add your own custom CSS.

And here is the finished template:

I have gone for quite a simple look here, but you can use one of the other templates and backgrounds to give a different look. In fact here is another variation on the template that I made:

You can still upload your own header as before so you personalize it still further.

Overall, this is a really easy to use tool and gives you a huge range of options. Hopefully the days of many Blogger blogs looking rather similar are coming to an end.

Working on a New Look for Extra Cash Challenge

I have come to radical decision that I no longer like the template that I did have. The reasons for this are:

1. It takes too long to load
2. Too many other people have the same template
3. I didn't like the look of the sidebars.

I wanted something that is clean and simple, and much easier to navigate. I couldn't find anything that I liked to download, so I have been trying to make one myself. I am not nearly clever enough to make one from scratch so I have taken the Blogger Minima template and have been modifying it with the help of template hacks that I have found on various blogs. I am still playing with it at the moment so at the time of writing you will see that most of the links across the top don't go anywhere and the sidebars are a bit empty. I am trying to avoid unnecessary clutter so I will thinking through carefully what will be going in.

You can see what I have been playing with on my experimental blog.

What Has Happened to My Template?!

I have been attempting to make some improvements to my template such as adding social bookmarking buttons, making sure the subscribe by e-mail box actually works, etc. But something has gone wrong somewhere because sometimes (not always) it does very strange things. So apologies for that - at least the posts themselves are not affected. I am going to try and put it right over the next few days. I think it will be a case of going back to the original template that I downloaded and starting again! Wish me luck!!!

Change of Template

I have just downloaded a new template for my blog. I decided on a download rather than to try and make one of my own, but there are a number of things I haven't figured out with this yet, so please bear with me.

Blogger Templates

Now that I have been doing this blogging thing for a couple of months I have realised that my template is a bit boring! I thought it looked quite cool when I chose it, but now I have spent lots of time looking at other people's blogs I have realised that actually it isn't at all. Especially now I have seen several others with exactly the same template. Also, another problem with it is lack of space. I am hoping to make some money with this blog at some point in the future - although I realise now it may take a while. So I need a template that allows me more advertising space as well as other widgets etc.

So my current template just has to go. The question is......what do I replace it with??? My first dilemma is - do I download a template, or do I create my own. At this precise moment in time I have no idea how create my own template, although I could find out. So I have started trawling the web for downloadable Blogger templates that would work with my blog. I haven't seen any that I particularly like so far, but I'm not in any great hurry - it's more important that I get the right one. And if I can't find the right one, then I will just have to learn how to create my own!! I get the feeling this may take a while.........