Recently, I've been experimenting with several different blog engines for my church's use. Along the way, I noticed that Blogger (or Blogspot), is now offering a very flexible way to customize said look & feel.
So from a visual perspective, here's what our blog looks like now (left) and my vision of how I want it to look like (right):
Therein lies the first step to customizing. Have a vision for how you would like your blog to look like. Design a layout you like respecting the fact that you still must have an area for blog posts and an area for widgets. Feel free to draw inspiration from other sites. Take a peek inside my thought process:
- The blog area is way too narrow - I'd like to widen it. I don't want to use the full width of the page because I like the look of "side curtains". So maybe I could expand the content panel from 765 pixels to 1000 pixels and give most of that room to the blog posts.
- My wife likes blue. A litte bit of a cold colour but tranquil. I think I will use different shades of blue for my site. And I'll use black for the side curtains - makes the page "pop" more.
- I'd like to have a big banner photo at the top of the page. If only I had some photography skills like Lloyd at Night & Day or Laura Hana, I could take my own photo. Oooh! found a nice free stock photo at Stock Exchange. And it's mainly blue which goes well with my colour scheme.
- Hmm, I think a 2 column layout like the way I have it now is ok. I still want all the posts to be on the left and all the widgets on the right.
- Right, now let me mock this up on Corel Photo-Paint (or CorelDraw, or Adobe Illustrator, or Adobe Photoshop, or whatever design tools you prefer). I grew up on Photo-Paint so I'm sticking with what's familiar.
- Oh yes, I'd like to get rid of that navigation bar/tool bar, if possible.
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