How To Give Blogger Blog A Professional
Look Through Templates

Blogger The Platform

Blogger is a very popular platform from Google and has been the entry point for many in the arena of blogging. Blogger provides a free way to start blogging. And it is very easy to get started. Simply get registered and start blogging. One of the first things that a blogger wants to do is to give his blog an attractive look. Although blogger comes with some ready to use templates, more often than not bloggers want to give their blog a sassy look.


Give Your Blog A Professional Look

Blogger has evolved over time. I have seen many blogs hosted on blogger which can give many websites a run for their money and looks. This blogging platform allows you to customize every aspect of your blog.There are many websites which provide professional looking blogger templates for free. Just Google the term free blogger template and you will see the tons of sites offering blogger templates free of charge. Some blogger templates are html based but more polular are the XML based ones. Some websites even offer beautiful wordpress themes converted for blogger.

These sites allow you to download the template and update your blogger template. Although the process is very smooth and even a non-techie person can do the basics of updating the blogger template, there are times the things go wrong while updating the template and it becomes almost impossible to revert to old one. Here are a few things that I have learnt while updating blogger. These small steps go a long way in making your blogging experience smooth.

Backup Old Template

I know it has become a cliche to say so. But this step is very essential and people often overlook it. Things can go wrong anytime when updating blogger template. Sometimes you may get a cryptic error message that something wrong happened and so your template could not be updated. That is why before going for updating the template, it is very essential that you save a backup of the existing template so that you can revert back and start over if things go wrong.

To do so go to Blogger Dashboard -> Layout -> Edit HTML

There you will find the Download Full Template link. Click on it to save the template.

Update The Image URLs Used In Blogger Template

You will often notice that goodlooking templates often use images for certain elements of blog. For instance, there may be a header image and an image to be displayed on sidebar. These images are fetched from template author's website or hosting space. There is a glitch. Suppose, the blogger template you are going to use is very popular and is going to be used by many bloggers all of them fetching same images from the same hosting site. There will obviously be a bandwidth problem. One fine day, you may find that content is there on your blog but the images are not there, because the bandwidth exceeded the limit.

To avoid this situation, find out which images are used. You can find this out easily. Simply open the template in wordpad and find the url(...) tags. There between brackets, is the url of the images the blogger template is fetching. Simply copy the url and copy it in a new tab and press enter. You will get the image. Download the image to a folder on your computer. Do this with all the images. Now find a image hosting site. There are plenty. Photobucket being one of the very popular one. Upload all your images to the image hosting site.



Update The Blogger Template

After you have uploaded the images, go again to the template code in the wordpad and replace the old url references with the new ones. Now your blog will fetch the images from your own hosting space.

Now you can update the blogger template and should the things go wrong you can always revert and start from the scratch.

Learn HTML And CSS

HTML and CSS are the bones of whether it be a blog or a full-fledged website. And knowing HTML and CSS gives you a definitive advantage when you go for customizing the blogger templates or tweaking them. You are not required to be a geek but HTML and CSS are something which cannot be ignored.

Link Back to the author

It takes time and effort of the author to create a blogger template and if the template is available for free generally there is a link at the bottom of the template pointing to the author's website.