New Blogger Design for You and Me!

Finally! I am “somewhat” finished with my new blog template/layout. I ended up not creating my own from scratch, it was ridiculously difficult so I modified a version of the generic template from ourblogtemplates.com. I have scoured the internet for more hours than I care to admit and honestly, if you want a generic template that can be customized over and over with new graphics, this is the best place to go and either find a free blogger template or use their tutorials to modify an existing one.

What do you think of it? Do you like it? Hate it? Didn’t even notice it? I’d love to hear from you so please leave a comment and let me know your opinions Thanks!

Since most of us are always looking for ways to make our blogs better, I thought I’d share what changes I made to mine and how I did it so that you can do it too (if you want).

A couple of things to remember when making changes to your blog template.

1. Always, Always backup your template before (and after) each change.
2. I suggest you test out your new design on a “test” site, this is what I did. I went to Blogger and clicked on “create a blog” in my dashboard. I created my template and tested it out on the test site before ever touching my real blog.

I will do this in several parts and below is just a small sample of what you can do to customize your blogger blog. These are a few of the things that I customized, added or removed in this new design.

• How to Customize Newer & Older Posts links in blogger template – as you can see if you scroll down to the end of the page, instead of text links that say “newer posts”, “older posts”, etc., I created images for those links which are much cuter Click here to see where I learned how to do this.
• How to Remove (Or temporarily hide) the “Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)” link from your blogger template. There are much better ways to do this and you can learn more about it by Clicking Here. I replaced mine with the all inclusive buttons from AddThis.com. (It’s free and easy to use).

• How to Add a label Cloud to your Blog – I replaced my “labels”widget with a label cloud as you can see in my right column —-> Click Here to get your own.
• How to Add a Twitter “Follow Me” Button to your Blog – If you want to add a Twitter “follow me” button click here to get your own. Lots to choose from and SO CUTE!
• Looking for Free Digital Scrapbooking kits? I used one from Bel Vidotti Scraps to create the graphics for this blog. She is awesome! (Site is not in English but there is a translator tool on the left side of the page that will translate it for you). She honestly has the best DS kits I’ve seen online!
• How to Embed Comment Form into Your Blog Pages – This is so easy now! Blogger users now have the ability to embed comments below each post, so that when you open a specific post, all of the comments will show up in the bottom, together with a quick “post a comment” box for a new one. You can also customize it. Click here to learn how.

If there is something specific that you would like to do to your blog, leave me a comment and I’ll do my best to find it for you. I will add more to this subject in the future but hopefully this should be enough to get you started for now

Until next time, Happy Blogging and Happy Scrappin’!