7: Changing the look of your blog

You can change the look of your blog by-

  1. Choosing a different Theme
  2. Customising your Theme
  3. Changing the Layout with gadgets and their placement
  4. Using the toolbar options when composing your pages and posts
Note: You need to change the look of each blog. 

Choosing a different theme

  1. Sign in to Blogger
  2. On the left-hand side, click on the Down arrow
  3. Choose the correct blog to update (if you have more than one)
  4. In the left menu, click Theme
  5. Select your theme and at the bottom, click Apply.
We're using Contempo in our short program. Blogger has many themes and variations that change the look of your blog. As you become more experienced in using Blogger, you might decide a different Theme is more suitable for the content of your blog. You can Preview to see how the different themes will alter the appearance of your blog. If you APPLY the THEME, you may lose some of the customisation and layout that you have in your current blog theme. Here's a Preview of two different Themes for our blog.

Travel Flight

Simple Literature

Customising your theme

Background: Changing your blog's background image

(Other Themes like Travel Flight and Simple Literature also allow you to alter other settings like column widths.)

  1. Sign in to Blogger
  2. On the left-hand side, click on the Down arrow
  3. Click blog to update
  4. In the left menu, click Theme
  5. Under My Theme click Customise
  6. To customise your background image use the left menu
  7. Select Remove Image or Change Image - select another image, then click done
  8. In the bottom right, click Save
You can either upload an image from your computer or use one of the Theme's preset images.

Note that you can select Reset background and colour to theme default to undo any changes you've made.

Advanced features

You might choose to explore the Advanced features when you're more experienced. The drop down menu allows you to choose different settings for-
    • Page text
    • Backgrounds
    • Links
    • Blog title
    • Tabs text
    • Posts
    • Search
    • Sharing
    • Popular posts
    • Post navigation
    • Sidebar
    • Author profile
    • Labels
    • Attributions
    • Widths
    • Add CSS

Advanced features: Changing your blog's font, colour and size

    1. Sign in to Blogger
    2. On the left-hand side, click on the Down arrow
    3. Choose the blog to update
    4. In the left menu, click Theme
    5. Under My Theme click Customise 
    6. In the left-hand menu click Advanced
    7. Choose the feature of your blog to change
    8. In the bottom right, click Save
In our program, we'll look at a number of Advanced features for-
  • Page text
  • Backgrounds
  • Blog title
  • Tabs text and
  • Posts

Changing the Font of the Page text alters-
  • the text of the Description that appears below the Blog title (highlighted below),
  • the time stamp format in your Posts and
  • Attribution at the end of the blog.




Backgrounds has three very useful features-

1. Using Background height changes the size of your Background image. You can see in the images below the difference when the height is at the minimum and maximum.

2. Background body colour alters the colour that surrounds the home page, posts and pages. You can see the colour is now light grey for this blog.

3. Post background colour allows you to choose a colour for the background of your pages and posts. You can see the colour for the pages and posts in this blog is now yellow.

                                                                


Blog title is the place for you to alter the Font and Colour for your Blog title.






Tab text is the place for you to alter the Font and Text colour for the three to five tabs for your Posts and Pages







Posts has four useful features:-

1.  Post title colour is orange for our blog.

2. Post title font is Verdana 26px for our blog.

3. Post text font is Verdana 15px for our blog. Note Use the toolbar when composing Pages and Posts for bold and italics in your text.

4. Post text colour is black for our blog.


Note that you can select Clear advanced changes to each of these features to undo any changes you've made.

Changing the Layout with gadgets and their placement 

This was covered under Step 5 of 1:Creating your blog HERE.

Using the toolbar options when composing your pages and posts

You can use the toolbar to alter the font, text size and text types.  See 4: Composing your pages and posts HERE.

Remember any questions or comments can be sent through the blog's contact form or posted on our Facebook group.

What's next?

References

Blogger has excellent help HERE.
A quick YouTube video HERE.

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Click here to follow our blogging musings!

Before you begin, please read about the program  HERE. Three ways to find information in our blog- You can use the looking glass on the top right of the home page to search the blog. You can go to a selected post by using the link below. You can use the labels in the blog. There can be accessed from the drop down menu if you see it on the left hand side of the screen or, otherwise, by selecting the three lines at the top left of the screen. Here are the links to the six blogs that support the content of our program- Creating your blog  includes your activity to create a blog Adding pages to your blog  includes your activity to publish a page Adding posts to your blog  includes your activity to publish a post Composing your pages and posts Adding images and videos to your pages and posts Comments, Contacts, Sharing and Following Changing the look of your blog Reviewing the current Layout of our blog Setting Permissions - who can author or read...
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8: Reviewing the current Layout of our blog

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