How to Create a Simple Customised Blog Design (Part 3, Finishing Touches)

This is the final instalment in a three part guide on how to create your own simple, customised blog design (here are parts one and two). If you've followed the instructions up until this point, you'll have a clean looking blog layout that's customised in colours and fonts of your choice- but it's not quite finished yet. In this post I'll show you how to make final adjustments that will refine your blog and make it look that bit tidier. 

Step One: Centre Sidebar Titles
In the last guide I showed you how to create sidebar title images that match your header using Picmonkey.com. You'll notice that when you upload these, they don't sit central in your sidebar and instead veer off to the left. You can fix this by copying the piece of coding from THIS page. Go to Blogger's template designer and under 'advanced' scroll down to 'add CSS.' Underneath where you pasted the code to remove image borders, paste the piece of code and press return. Your titles will now be central. If they still look slightly mis-matched, you might need to adjust the size and positioning of the font in Paint, just make sure the width of the overall document is the same width as your blog sidebar (you can check this by going to template designer, 'adjust widths' and check how many pixels wide your sidebar is. Then use Picmonkey's 'resize' option). If you have stuck with Blogger's standard gadget text as titles rather than use images, you can centre these titles by following this tutorial.

Step Two: Centre Your Tabs/ Pages Links
These are the links that appear under your header (About Me, Contact etc) at the moment they'll be sitting to the left of your header. You need to copy the code from THIS page (including the full stops at the beginning) and as with step one, paste it into the 'add CSS' section of Blogger template designer underneath the previous pieces of code. Once you've pasted it, press return and your page tabs will now sit central.

Step Three: Remove Blogger Navbar
The navbar is the strip right along the top of your blog, it's unnecessary and can detract from your blog design. You can turn this off by going to 'layout' from the drop down bar of your Blogger dashboard, and at the top click on the 'navbar' widget. When the box pops up switch this to off, you'll now notice though that there's a space above your blog's header. To remove this copy the piece of coding from THIS page, go to Blogger template designer and paste into the 'add CSS' box under the other pieces of coding you've added. Press return and the space above the header will disappear.

Optional: Choose a Background Image
If you'd rather have a patterned background on your blog, you'll need to use a 'seamless image'. A seamless image is an image that can be repeated without showing boundary lines- think of it a bit like a pattern on regular wallpaper that you'd hang on your wall. If you use an image that isn't seamless, it will display on your background as big blocky squares. A lot of the seamless images you'll probably find online will be watermarked, but there are free ones out there too if you look hard enough. I've put together an album of seamless images to get you started (you can find it HERE), I've adjusted the colours and sizes of the prints on Photoshop to give you the biggest range of options. Feel free to download and use any of them from the album, or search for your own. If you're using a patterned background it's always best to uncheck the 'scroll with background' box. This is because it can be distracting when readers are scrolling through your blog.

Your Simple, Customised Blog Design
If you've followed all of the steps from the three guides in this series, you'll have something that looks like my example above (but customised to your own tastes). Everything should look clean and tidy, all of your fonts, colours and titles will match and everything will sit central. Best of all it didn't cost you a penny, every programme used was free and you didn't need to pay a blog designer. In the future I'll be writing a beginners guide to image mapping, which will show you how to get clickable social media buttons and headers.

I hope you've found these tutorials useful and easy to follow, if you have any questions at all leave them below
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