DIY Blog Design

Five Safety Precautions before you start Fiddling with your Blog

This post was originally published at Songbird. If you like DIY inspiration of the home and decor kind, than please visit me there.

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Howdie Lovelies, I am glad you all gathered here today for the next episode in my DIY Blog Design series. I know that you are all sitting at the edge of your seat to learn the real tricks, but before I even allow you to make any changes whatsoever I have to make sure you play safe.

Voor de Nederlandse dames. Voor het gemak (vooral dat van mij) schrijf ik mijn blog in het Engels en dus ook deze serie over hoe je zelf het een en ander aan je blog kunt veranderen. Dat wil niet zeggen dat jullie mij geen vragen in het Nederlands kunnen stellen of niet om wat meer uitleg kunnen vragen. Aarzel dus niet om het mij te laten weten als je iets niet snapt of vragen hebt. Ik help jullie graag!

So today is all about taking the necessary precautions in order to make sure you never ever have to be sorry about messing with your blog.

I know it is boring, but I do assure you, if you follow my advice there will come a time when you will want to drop down on your knees to thank me for saving your …

And if you are foolish and do not listen to me, you will be sorry. I know, I have been there…..

NUMBER 1

Back up your blog and template!!

Yes I mean you too! Listen to me here, this is important!!!!

You can make a copy of all your posts. That way, when and if someone highjacks your Google account or something of the sort and you cannot access your blog anymore – and yes that does happen! more often then you want to know -, you can start all over and your precious posts will not be lost. So back up your blog regularly. I would recommend at least once a month.

And your template needs to be saved regularly too. Your template is all the code that is used to make your blog look the way it looks. Even if you have not yet changed anything yourself to the code, you still need to back it up because all those choices you made when you first started working with your blog have been registered in that code.

I could tell you how to do this but smarter women have gone before me and explained it all in great detail:

Donna from FunkyJunkInteriors did a full tutorial on how to back up your blog posts.
Rita from the awesome photography blog The CoffeeShop Blog wrote a tutorial on how to back up your blog posts and your template.

NUMBER 2

Make a Print Screen

Ok we are home and craft bloggers here. And you all should know by know you should never start a makeover without a good before photo. And believe me it is fun to go back later and see how your blog has evolved. Now I know MAC users have some sort of neat special feature to make print screens, I envy you. But for the PC users who do not know how to do it. This is how I do it.

Close up as many tool bars in your browser as possible ( in IE you can uncheck the toolbars under the menu Extra). You want your blog to really fill up your screen.
Look for the key on your keyboard that says “Prnt Scrn”, the letters might be tiny but there will be a key (usually somewhere on the top or bottom rows). Hit it.
Type Control C (as in the shortcut for the copy command)
Go to programs and look for the program paint. It is usually in your folder with office accessories (where you can find your calculator and your game of solitary too). Open the program and type Control V (as in the shortcut for paste).
There it is! Now you can save this file as a jpeg in any folder you choose to save it in. Done!

You know have a proper before picture. And while your at it make sure that your followers count is included in your picture, or make a note of it. Keeping tabs on a couple of statistics for your blog is also fun and shows you how you grow.

NUMBER 3

Make a test blog

Ok now we are getting somewhere. This is the first step to some real fun. You will want to try and test out lots of cool new things for your blog. But you do NOT want to test and play with the real thing. Create a play ground first where you can’t mess up. You all know how to create a blog, and the beauty of blogger is, that it allows you to make as many blogs as you would like. So go to your dashboard, click “ create blog” and make yourself a testblog. Mine is called Songbirdtestblog how original!

You can start all fresh with this blog and give it a whole new design, or you can upload your previously saved template (remember Number 1!) and start to change that.

Having a testblog has saved me many times over. Not only when I was messing with my blog design, but also when I had ‘special’ gimmicks in a post. I always try new stuff out on my test blog, including posting blog posts to it if I am trying to do something new (like adding a YouTube video) just to see whether it works like planned. And if I have changed my blog banner I always post it to my testblog first, so I can see if it looks like I wanted it to.

NUMBER 4

Streamline your profile

Now that you have a new testblog, you do not want to whole world to see how you are messing it up. So streamline your profile. Do this too if you have more than one active blog, please!!!

Thrust me it is easy. Log in to your blogger dashboard and look under your profile pic for ‘edit profile’

(My blogger settings are all in Dutch in this picture, sorry about that). So click on edit profile.

On the next page look for “ show my blogs” and then click on the blue link behind it “ Select blogs to display”. It will give you a list of your blogs, now unclick every blog that you don’t want people to find.

Ok, btw while you are on this page. Put a check mark into the box ‘show my email address’ and you will never be a <noreply.blogger> commenter again.

Important message for all multiple blog owners!!

Please, pretty please, if you have created a lot of blogs, do us commenters a favor and do NOT show all of you inactive blogs in your profile. So often I want to visit someone’s blog by clicking on their profile link in my comment section and I run into this 10 blog long list. Figuring which blog is the ‘active’ blog or the home décor blog can be so bothersome. Sometimes when I am really busy (thus in fact always) I just won’t bother figuring it out and leave.

And pretty pretty please, you can change the name of your blog. Make sure that the title you display distinguishes one blog from another. So if you have one active blog and one blog you have used for your links, or your awards or the photo’s of your dog, please let that be reflected in the title. It is completely safe to change that here in your settings, your blog address will not change!

Ok rant over.

Now people who visit you through your profile will not stumble upon your testblog. But the google robots still might and you don’t want that either. So from your dashboard go to ‘Settings’ – of your testblog - and right there on the first Basic tab change a few things.

Change the settings to NO for: “ Add your blog to our listings” , and to No for “ let search engines find your blog”.

Now you are safe. No one will find you. If you really want to make sure no one can read your testblog you could also go to the permissions tab and select “only blog authors can read this blog” .

NUMBER 5

Keep a log

Ok this last one isn’t necessarily a safety precaution, but just damn useful. Start keeping a log of your blog design work right away. Your log could be anything. A folder in which you safe all posts like this one, that taught you how to do something and maybe a word document in which you record some settings, or a simple notepad. But thrust me once you have carefully selected a color for your background, or chosen your favorite font for your sidebar titles, you want to remember it.

Somewhere down the line you will experiment and change something, and then when you want to change it back later, you can’t remember how you did it, or what the exact color code was. Your log will save your sanity many times over. Start one right away!

Ok that’s it for now. Next week I’ll work with you on a real design issue. Shall we start with your blog banner? I have already some questions about that in my file, but if you have any Blog Banner related questions let me know, and I’ll see if I can answer them.

Was this useful at all? Did I hash up a lot of things you already knew or was there a bit of new information for you! Please let me know I am open to all feedback. And if you have more safety precautions let us all know in the comments.

Love,

Marianne

Five things to consider BEFORE you start to work on your blog design

This post was originally published at Songbird. If you like DIY inspiration of the home and decor kind, than please visit me there.

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This post is an adaptation from a guest post that was posted on Beautiful Blog Designs in January 2010

Welcome to the first post in my new DIY Blog Design series. Thank you so much to everybody who left me a comment with a design question. They have all gone in my DIY Blog Design folder and I hope I’ll be able to answer most if not all of them. Keep the questions coming!

In January 2010 I did a guest post on Beautiful Blog Designs (that since has moved to a new address) outlining five things you have to think about before you start (re)designing your blog. I think that post is a good place to start my new DIY Blog Design series, so I’ll repost it here.

I am DIY when it comes to blog design and I would love to share some of my insights and experiences with homemade blog designing.

We home and craft loving gals are a visual bunch, aren’t we? We want our homes and creative products to be as beautiful as possible. And since our blog is our home on the web, most of us really want our blog to be as eye pleasing as possible too.

Of course there are many talented and gifted women out there who have specialized in giving your blog a makeover and making it really beautiful. But rightfully so, these women like to get paid for their creative talent and their hard work. If you are like me, a hobby blogger whose blog doesn’t really generate an income (yet), paying someone to work on your blog may not really be in your budget. So you are left to you own devices to make your blog more beautiful. And trust me, it can be done!

But before we dive into the world of blog templates, HTML coding and navigational bars, lets do some groundwork first.

Just like when you are considering to give a thrift shop find a makeover: before you can get your paintbrush out and decide on the paint color you are going to use, you have to consider the way you are intending to use the piece, if it is needing repairs and how many layers of old chippy paint and dirt you have to remove first. The same principle applies to blog design. Before you start concentrating on the pictures you are going to use in your header and the color scheme of your blog there are five things you have to think about first:

1. Your blog is for your readers.

I know you are all tempted to say ‘no I blog just for me, because I like it’. But lets face it girls if we really only blogged for ourselves we wouldn’t make our blog public, we would keep it a private (online) journal. We all want other people to read our blog and admire and enjoy our hard work. So whenever you are considering doing anything to your blog, ask yourself first if that will make the blogging experience for your readers more pleasant. Your blog design should include all the elements that make your blog really useful and usable to your readers.

2. What does your blog mean?

I think if you asked most women in our home and garden blog niche why they love blogging they would answer two things: because of the inspiration it gives them and second because of the community it makes them feel a part of. You and your blog are part of that community. So your blog design should be aimed at showcasing your projects and ideas, so that they provide maximum inspiration (lot’s of BIG pictures is one element of this) and at the same time give your visitor’s a sense that they are truly welcome and that it is fun visiting with you. And then before you know it your readers become friends.

3. Clutter is clutter, even when it is the online kind.

Ever wonder why those pictures in design magazines always look so beautiful, even when they do not resemble your style? It is because of the lack of clutter. You might see a carefully draped blanket somewhere, or a casually forgotten book on a chair (with a coordinating cover color of course!), but you will never see hundreds of knickknacks, leftover breakfast dishes or dirty socks in those pictures. If you consider the blog designs you like best, I bet that they are pretty clutter free too. There are so many gadgets, and widgets and funny buttons available to add to our blogs these days. It is really tempting to fill up your sidebars with all of them. But often they are just clutter. Clutter that is distracting your readers from your content and might even make your blog really slow to load. So when considering to add another cutesy button remember the first rule: your blog is for your readers, will adding it make you blog more useful or usable?.

4. Your blog is a reflection of you.

When I gave my blog a major makeover, I started the way I start any project. I looked at the way others had done it. So I started to make a list of blogs, whose design I liked and then I started to break it down. What kind of layout did I like best, which banner drew me in the most, when did the size of the font or the pictures feel too small, which elements did I find very useful (or annoying). And then I started to try and incorporate those elements in my blog (or in some cases remove them from my existing design). When I thought I was nearly finished I asked a friend for her opinion and her reply made me almost start over completely. She said, “I like it, it looks very good, but it doesn’t look like you anymore”. And she was right, I was making a blog design like all the others. It wasn’t ‘me’ anymore. So I worked on it a lot longer, making it less like a beautiful online ‘house’ and more like my personal online ‘home’.

5. Embrace the challenge, but keep it real.

If you had unlimited time you could make your blog the most beautiful blog in the world. There is always another design element you could add, a functionality you could improve or an opportunity to add even more beauty to your design. But if you did that, you wouldn’t have any time to blog anymore. And no matter how beautiful the design of your blog is, people come to visit you for your content. Content comes first, design comes second. So do step into the world of HTML coding, it is not as difficult as you might think, but keep your expectations real. Fiddling with your blog design can be addictive (ask me how I know that) but if it starts to interfere with your actual blogging it is counterproductive.