Blogger is an excellent platform for beginners or people that are not so much into the technical aspects of blogging. It has many benefits – it’s free, easy to handle, nothing complicated to install and an extensive support. You sacrifice some of the flexibility other platforms like for example WordPress has, but on the other hand, less functions is less problems.
People use Blogger in different ways and for various purposes. Many of the bloggers on Blogger don’t get the attention they deserve although they have very appealing blogs (see some examples below) with great and interesting content.
Changing the look of your blog does not guarantee automatic success, but it does give you some advantage to build upon. And if changing the look of the blog is free and easy, why not giving it a try?
In this article we will change the appearance of your Blogger blog by using an extern template (not provided by Blogger).
Preparations
Remember to backup a copy of your current Blogger template. If something goes wrong or if the new template isn’t that great after all, it is possible you might like to change back to your current template.
How To Backup Your Template
- Login to Blogger
- After entering the Dashboard page – click Design.
- Then click edit HTML tab.
- Click the Download Full Template link.
- Choose where to save and name the file – click the Save button.
- Finished – you have now a backup of your template
You could create a folder on your computer called “Blog Templates – Back-Up” and “Blog Widgets – Back-Up” or something similar. The important is to have some kind of system – templates and backups have a habit to be mysteriously absent when you really are in need of them. Do the same with all files which belong to your blog.
Find A New Blogger Template
If you search for “free blogger template” in Google you will get more results than you ever will have strength to go through. You have to ask yourself seriously what your practical and aesthetic needs are – and then choose from that.
A good idea is to keep it as clean as possible – cluttered templates with many widgets take time to load and can be extremely annoying and confusing.
Some Blogger Templates You Can Use For Free
Butterfly is originally a WordPress theme designed by Templates4all.com converted into Blogger format. The template comes with two sidebars in the left and the main column in the right side. The highlight of the template is the mind blowing vector header.
Pepper is a 3 column Blogger Template. The template was orginally a WordPress theme designed by Jinsona of web2feel.com and then converted into Blogger format. The template has built-in spots for 125×125 ads. Suitable for personal and affiliate blogging.
2 Columns and fixed width template. Designed for WordPress by Blog Oh Blog and adapted for Blogger by Anshul Dudeja. A dark and clean Blogger template suitable for photography and personal pages. Could also be used for product portfolios.
2 Columns Blogger template with fixed width. Originally designed for WordPress by New WordPress Themes and adapted for Blogger by Dhampire. The template has built-in spots for 125×125 and 468×60 ads and is suitable for affiliate marketers.
A minimalist and white 2 columns Blogger template with fixed width. The template is good looking and loads very fast – which is important if you want your visitors return on a regular basis. Developed by Fernando Coello on Quite Random.
Of course you can search for some other templates if you don’t like those above, there is a huge selection of both free and premium templates out on Internet. Just type in “free blogger template” in Google and you will have a lot to choose from.
Remember to extract (unzip) the archive with the Blogger template you just downloaded.
Upload A New Template
Now when you have chosen a template you would like to use it’s time to upload the template to Blogger. It is not at all a complicated procedure and everybody with some basic Internet knowledge can do it.
Watch the tutorial video above and follow the instructions or read below (or do both). You can also watch the video on the Original YouTube Video Page.
How To Upload A New Template
- Download and unzip the template file.
- Login to your Blogger Dashboard.
- Go to Design, click Edit HTML.
- Browse for the XML template file that you have just downloaded.
- Click on the Upload button.
- Confirm and save template
If you now view your blog you should see that the appearance has changed. Now you can add some widgets – but remember, do not add too much of them. A cluttered and slow blog is a sure way to scare off visitors.
If you really want a unique look on your blog then customizing the template is the option for you – small changes can make a surprisingly big difference. Amanda Fazani at Blogger Buster has a serial of articles on how to customize your Blogger Template. The tutorials explain in a fairly simple way how to do the customizations – you find the link below.
2 comments:
I came accross your blog today and got some new knowledge about how to change blogger template.Thanks for taking time and discuss this blog.
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thanks for sharing such a informative article. You explained it very well and in such a way that it seems very easy to understand.
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