The look and feel of your blog

A template controls how your site appears, via a cascading style sheet (css) written in html. Blogger prompts new members to select one, while creating a site.

One of the first considerations is how many columns you want and where they lie (left side vs right). Some bloggers prefer the wider text field of the two-column format. I've chosen that for Road Remedies, since its purpose is to showcase my writing. The right panel (sidebar) contains various text boxes (About Me, Links and the blogroll, named "Barrel of Monkeys"), as well as widgets. These plug-n-play mini-programs organize the blog's archives, insert ads from Google and Amazon, and so forth.

For the class blog, we've gone with a three-column layout, as we plan to demonstrate a lot of widgets. Blogger, unfortunately, doesn't have an off-the-shelf template for this. You gotta hack. Luckily Mike's done that heavy lifting and is happy to share his code. Interested students should let him know in week two's assignment.

For now, don't stress too much about the look – the "skin" –  at this point. You can always experiment with different options: go to Blogger>Dashboard>Layout>Pick New Template on the beige bar.

Click the orange "Save Template button" when you're finished.

Next week we'll explore Blogger's Dashboard in more depth and discuss how to craft certain styles and elements. Feel free to experiment in the meantime: remember that no change is permanent until you hit that orange "save" button.