Better Your Blog - Blogging Resources

Change Your Look

2011-08-24T15:24:00.000-07:00

If you'd like to know how to change the theme/template on your Blogger blog, I'm going to attempt to show you how in this post!

First, you'll need to find a theme you like. I listed a few places to get free themes HERE. If there isn't one on the sites listed in that post, you can Google "Free Blogger Themes" or "Free Blogger Templates".

Once you've found the theme you want to put on your blog, you should see something like this:

You can click"Live Demo" to see what it looks like full size. Click "Download" to download it. Make sure you put it somewhere you can find it and DO NOT OPEN IT.

Now, go into your Blogger Dashboard, click "Design", click on "Edit HTML" and you'll see this:

Don't mess around with all the jibber jabber HTML code, or you will do some damage unless you know what you're doing. What you need to do click on "Choose File". Select the template you've downloaded and click "Upload".

Make sure you save your changes. Always save your changes. Now you should be able to see your new template on your blog! Once it's on there, you can work on placing your widgets where you want them and getting your new blog (or newly made over blog) ready for the public to see.

Image Hosting

2011-08-22T20:41:00.000-07:00

One thing you'll definitely need is image hosting. It makes the life of a blogger so much easier!

Why do you need image hosting when you can easily upload an image from your computer?

Well, when you get into monetizing your blog (I'll talk about this later on), sometimes you only get the URL to the image, and no way to save that image to your computer. That's when image hosting will come in very handy. Then, you can just enter the image URL and upload the image that way. Here's a picture of how it works:

Image hosting also comes in very handy when you have a button for your site and you want the HTML code for the button. (I'll also show you this later on.)

I've always used Photobucket.com to host my images. I know there are others, but that's what I learned with and I'm pretty loyal. Once I found something I like that works, why change? Oh, and Photobucket is free to use!

Choose Your Blog Platform

2011-08-22T20:21:00.000-07:00

You want to start a blog, but which platform do you use?

Blogger is a free blogging platform. I would recommend Blogger if you're a beginner. It's highly customizable and you can find many free templates* and install them yourself.

Wordpress.org is also free. Wordpress doesn't have many different design options. There are themes inside you can choose from, but none that I really like. You can find some free themes, but installing them is a bit harder than on Blogger.

Wordpress.com is not free. You have to purchase your own domain name and hosting. Like the free version, designing one isn't the easiest to do. I couldn't design my self hosted Wordpress blog myself, I had to turn to a professional for help.

I used to prefer Wordpress over Blogger, but Blogger has changed a lot since then and I like it now.

*Here's some places to get free Blogger templates:
Blogger Buster
Blogger Themes
Best Blogger Templates
Ray Templates

There are also other blog platforms available, but these are the only two I've ever used. Search "Blog Platform" on Google and see what others you can find.