Prettying Up the Place

When I decided to start up a new blog, I also wanted to try and learn a little more about the blogging process.  I understood writing posts and having followers and all that good stuff, but I didn't know much about customizing my blog.  All I'd ever done was change up my background or layout templates through blogger's own editing guidelines.

Actually, while I was "in between" blogs, I considered switching over to wordpress. I played around with the idea of getting a wordpress.com account- the kind you pay for- but that was way over my head.  Then I checked out making a wordpress.org account - the kind that's free- and even though it was closer to blogger's format, I still found a lot of it to be rather confusing.  So the decision of sticking with Blogger was made.

That's when I started a little internet sleuthing, combing around, watching different tutorials on how to make a custom background for your blog, or how to change the alignment of things.  Turns out, customizing your blogger blog is way freaking easier than I thought.  Also?  There are hundreds bloggers who have not only already figured out all the possible tips and tricks there are to customizing your blogger site, but they've also  written incredibly clear, step-by-step (with images!) posts about the different processes.  These people are awesome!  Here are a few who helped me out, big-time!

1. The Cutest Blog on the Block - The name says it all!  When I typed in "How do I make a custom background for my blogger blog?" into google search, this post was the first to pop up.  I used Indy's computer (he's got Photoshop) to make my background from an image I found off of Google, and was done in minutes!  The only thing I would say about these instructions is that toward the very end, where it says to copy the "code" for your image from the image hosting site you use, make sure you copy the "direct link" code.  I copied about 4 others before that one, and was getting frustrated when they didn't work.  But other than that small detail, these instructions worked like a charm!  I will definitely be hitting up this site in the future.

2. Tet's Little Finds - After setting up my background, the next step was trying to center my header so that it fit right in between the two textured sides.  I tried to remember what I could from my middle school days of xanga and livejournal, and threw the 'ol <center> </center> into the HTML section of blogger, but it didn't work.  I goggled, "How do I center my blogger header?" And in two seconds I had my answer, in this post.  Absurdly easy.

3. Beautiful Dawn Designs - Naturally, after the header was centered, I needed my pages tabs to be centered as well.  So what did I do? You guessed it, I asked Google, and this post came up.  Strikingly similar to Tet's Little Finds, but the coding was just different enough that I don't think I could've done it on my own.

I'm sure as time goes on I'll continue to make little (or big) changes here and there.  I'm just so thankful there are people out there who are smart, well-spoken (or maybe, well-written?) and kind enough to post such clear, easy tutorials for all bloggers to benefit from.  If you feel like your blog needs a little sprucing up, don't hesitate to check any (or all) of them out!