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Customizing Your Blog The  look  that  you  picked  when  you  started  your  blog  might  be  just  fine,  but  many bloggers want to tweak and customize the look and feel of their  blogs —  I know  I did when  I started  working  on my blog.  I was using  personal words  and pictures, and  I  wanted to  make  the rest of  the site look  more  like my  own website  rather than a Blogger design. Blogger  differentiates  between  the  template  and  layout  of  your  blog.  The  template dictates  the  look  of  the  blog;  the  layout  is  the  placement  of  the  elements  of the blog. When  you start  your  Blogger blog, you choose a template, and that template determines  the look and feel of your  blog as well as the placement of the elements and  what  those  elements  are.  However,  you  should  think  of  the  template  and  the layout it comes with as a starting point; it’s not set in stone. You can change the look of a Blogger blog in four ways: » Change the template you are using completely. » Customize an existing template using the Template Designer. » Create your own template in HTML (see the “Editing templates old-skool: Using code” sidebar). » Edit the layout of your template to move, add, and remove elements. EDITING TEMPLATES OLD-SKOOL: USING CODE If you’re a web designer or coder and you want to sink your teeth into the Blogger template itself, you can do so. To get to the code from the Blogger Dashboard, select Template from the blog’s Dashboard and click Edit HTML for the template you’re using. From here, you can edit the HTML and save as you go. Blogger recommends that only advanced users use this tool. You should be proficient with HTML  and CSS and know a certain amount of Blogger’s own coding language to successfully  edit these files. Blogger suggests that using the Template Designer gives you good options without as much risk of breaking your blog.
Choosing a new template One of the fun  features  of Blogger is  the ability  to choose from a number  of templates  for  your  blog.  The  template  determines  both  the  look  and  feel  of  your  blog as well as how the blog  elements appear  on the page.  Blogger has many templates to choose from,  and don’t  forget that you can customize  or change the template later  if  your  first  choice  no  longer  looks  as  fresh  in  six  months.  (For  more  info,  see the “Using the Template Designer” section, later in this chapter.) To choose a template, follow these steps: 1.  From the Dashboard, select Template from the Posts drop-down list. 2.  Use the scrollbar to browse through the available templates in the Template screen. The previews on this page give you an idea of how your blog would look both on a computer and on mobile if you used the various templates. 3.  When you find something intriguing, click the thumbnail image. A larger image of the template opens in the window so that you can take a closer look, as shown in Figure 4-7. FIGURE 4-7:   You can preview the Blogger templates when you start a new blog. You can preview as many or as few templates as you want. To close a preview without implementing the template, click the X in the upper-right corner of the preview window.