Thursday, June 10, 2010

Blogger's Template Designer

I'm not sure when the Template Designer appeared, but it's pretty awesome. I played around with it a bit, and I absolutely LOVE that it's now possible to give your blog a 3-column layout with the click of a button. There aren't a whole lot of themes available, but there are several options for customizing them, depending upon which theme you choose. I think some themes will only allow you to choose between a selection of color schemes, while some will allow you to choose background images. One thing I don't particularly like is that there doesn't seem to be an option for uploading and choosing an image of your own - you have to choose one of the available images. The available images are nice, but an image of your own can really make your blog unique (says the girl who has only done a major edit of her blog layout once in 2+ years, and only to add a third column).

I was tempted to redo the whole look of this blog using the Template Designer, except for one thing - the look I was going to go with only gave me the option of adjusting column widths using number of pixels. I happen to prefer setting up column widths based on percentages. So, if I do switch to something else, I'll still have to look at the CSS and figure out if I can translate all the right bits into percentages. Or, I could bite the bullet and just be ok with pixels. Since I'm going to be moving to a computer with a ginormous monitor (23 inches!!) in a week or so, that might be a good way to go, since it'll get a lot harder to judge how good the percentages probably look on smaller monitors.

2 comments:

  1. I've been playing with the new designer a bit this afternoon but everything I see seems to have so much wasted space on the sides that I am not happy with the new look. Maybe I'm doing something wrong...

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  2. I don't think you're doing anything wrong - even trying to max out the total width of the blog, the results don't fill up the total width of my screen, and that's on my relatively small laptop. I imagine the amount of unused space will look even worse when I move to my new computer, with its 23" screen.

    I think Blogger is going in the right direction, with templates that are much easier for the average person to manipulate, but I don't think they went far enough. As far as I can tell, none of the templates let you fill up the entire width of a screen.

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