Customizing Your Blog with a Blog Kit
by Christine Gundersen

So you have probably seen a blog kit, or you have tons of graphics that you could use to make your own blog pieces, but how do you manage to get those pieces onto your blog? Ths tutorial is going to be based on Blogger, which you can find at www.blogger.com.

In case you don’t already have a blog set up, let’s look at that first.

Setting up your blog is very easy. Just create your account, name it and choose a template. When choosing a template, try to pick one that is set up generally how you want your blog to look. For instance, the presence and/or position of a side bar. The background color of your body area. You can change these things around, but no sense of making it hard on yourself. :D

Once you have your blog set up, it is time for the FUN!! At the top of your blog, there is a link called customize.

Make sure you are on the Layout tab (1) and the Page Elements tab (2).

There are 2 add gadgets buttons (3), one for the side bar and one for the full width of the blog. When you click on them, you will have the option to add a list, picture, html, links and many other options. Each gadget comes with an edit button that allows you to edit its features. To add the blog buttons as headings for your different sections. Choose the picture gadget, then have the .jpg or .png stored on the web, somewhere like photobucket, etc. Copy and paste the address of the .jpg/.png into the link bar.

To change the background paper, you must edit the HTML code. You may or may not be able to see this depending on the size of your monitor. Prior to making any changes to the HTML code, I highly recommend saving a copy of the code, so that even if you royally mess it up, you can just reload your old code and be back to where you were. :D

To add in your background paper, find the portion of the HTML that says “body”, change everything to look like my example, except have the address to the .jpg that you want to use. Again stored on photobucket or some other server. If changing the HTML makes you nervous, you can go under the fonts and colors tab and just change the background to a color of your choice, without going into the html itself.

There is a freebie blog kit in the Freebies section if you would like to try it out.

I can’t wait to see all of your fabulous blogs!!! Get out there and get creating. :D