CUSTOMIZING YOUR BLOG'S DESIGN (EPISODE 1)

H

y! I feel so excited that I’m finally doing this series on “Customizing your blog’s design.” Pretty sure you all are going to love it. Going through most blogs provoke two particular questions,” Why does everyone’s blog look virtually the same?” and “how can I make mine unique and different?”

One of Blogger’s best features is the ability to virtually customize every part of your blog. The templates available are but a small part of what you can do on Blogger.

Before we
dive into the day’s subject matter, we’ll love to let you know that we’ll begin by discussing your blog’s layout and the gadgets you have on your blog. This is where you can add, edit and remove gadgets from your blog. To rearrange your gadgets, you would simply have to click the gadget you need and drag it to where you want it to be. Our first post on this series would be, “3 basics of blog design.” To do something really well, one must settle first to understand the basics.

3 basics of blog design

A blog design first acts like a blog’s “behind the scenes.” It is of very great importance because it affects a visitor’s first impression of the blog. The three basic things that should be considered before blog designing are

v  The user/ visitor

v  The aim of the blog

v  The taste of the blogger

These are three very important factors. We’ll begin with customizing the blog to increase its user friendliness. This is mainly affected by the blog’s layout. We’ll discuss how to customize a blog’s layout.

How to customize your blog Layout

1.       Blog favicon

: The first thing you’ll see on the blog Layout page is your blog Favicon. This is much like an icon that is displayed alongside your blog’s URL address. Every blog has the default blogger icon.

·         You can simply change this by clicking “edit.”

·         A new window will be opened. This is where you can upload your custom favicon image

·         You’ll be asked to upload an image you’ll want to use from your computer.

·         Note that this must be a square image and must be less than 100kb.

·         Click on choose file. When the image you selected has been shown, click save.

·         The window will be closed and you’ll be returned to the Blogger Layouts tab.

2.       Navbar (Navigations bar) configuration

: this is the next thing just after the layouts tab. clicking this opens a new window.

·         There are different options of a blue, tan, black, silver coloured Navbar.

·         There is also an option of a transparent light and transparent dark Navbar.

·         Finally, you can choose to have this off.

·         When you’re done, click “save” and you’ll be back in the layouts tab.

3.       Blog Header:

 this is the first thing you’ll likely see in any blog. It’s like a first test of how beautiful your blog will be. You’ll want to get it done right so your visitors will have a good first impression about your blog. There are various places one can get a great blog header for free. One can make use of Photoshop (if you’re good at that), or design one yourself online. One very great site I’d recommend for this is Canva. The site’s url is www.canva.com

You just need to login by registering with your email address and selecting a password. You can also login using Facebook or Google+.

P.S Note that there are free designs and designs that’ll cost you a few cents. Well, that’s nothing compared to the satisfaction you’ll want to give your visitors.

4.       Cross-column:

 here, you are required to “Add a gadget”. You can skip this for now.

5.       Cross-column 2:

 we are not allowed to make any changes to this from the layouts tab.

6.       The left and right sidebars:

 here, we are required to add gadgets that we’ll need on our blog. The gadgets range from Google AdSense, featured post, profile, text, popular posts, video bar, blog stats,   search box, feed, logo, subscription links and a host of many others plus 3^rd party gadgets which Google for one reason, wouldn’t recommend that you add to your blog. Note that you may have more than the number of sidebars stated here. This depends totally on the needs of the blogger.

7.       Footer:

 you can choose to have up to five (5) footers on your blog. These are all meant for gadgets. Note that it is not too wise to have your blog crammed up with just too many gadgets. These might affect the page loading speed of your blog.

8.       Attribution gadget:

 this comes pre-installed on your blog. It here that you can add your privacy policy. This is a very important requirement for you to successfully join the Google AdSense program.

Hope our post was helpful? Please, comment in the comment box below. Do you have any challenges or questions about the Blogger layout? We’ll love to help you out.

Feel free to leave links to your blog in the comment box so we’ll see how you’re getting along. We’ll keep updating our blog but Watch out for our next blog post on this series on Monday.  Don’t want to miss any post, simply provide your email in the subscriber form and we’ll send you updates. Thanks. Do visit again!