Tips For Blog Templates

Definition Of A Blog
blog tutorial - Blogger blog service

So what is a blog? According to Wikipedia (a great source of constantly updated info), "A weblog, web log or simply a blog, is a web application which contains periodic time-stamped posts on a common web page. Weblog is a portmanteau of 'web' and 'log.' The term blog came into common use as a way of avoiding confusion with the term server log."

Let Your Blog Make A Splash

Once you choose a blogging service and set up an account, you will be provided with a standard blog template. But this template will suffer from a cookie-cutter design, and if you don't personalize it your blog may become lost. To be noticed your blog needs to make a splash - as there are more than ten million blogs out there. So what we'll concentrate on here is working with some design elements that can help you add more zing to your blog. At the end of the tutorial you'll find a list of free blog resources, and as a special bonus I've included an amazing martini recipe.

Give The Top Logo/Banner On Your Blog A Personal Touch

Whatever blogging software or service you decide to use, all of them will present you with a generic graphic for the top of your blog pages. This is the single most important element that you need to change.

If you know HTML and CSS you can do custom designs
http://colorschemedesigner.com/

Look & Feel is very important element in your design will be the overall color scheme of your blog. If you're new to design this can be a real challenge, as it takes some training to understand how colors work together. But there's help. http://colorschemedesigner.com/ offers a great color scheme generator that will make selecting a color palette for your blog pages effortless.

The site provides you with a color wheel to experiment with. Each time you select a new color on the wheel, complementary colors for your page are suggested. This allows you to choose from many different color schemes before you commit to one for your blog. Make sure to read through the help section where you'll find some valuable tips on how to generate the optimal color palette.

Build A Favicon And They Will Bookmark It

A Favicon is a little custom icon that appears next to a website's URL in the address bar of a web browser, and they are easy to make.


Uploading The Favicon.ico File
Connect to your server and upload your Favicon.ico file to your website. You must place it into the same directory as your home (index) page, and leave it loose, making sure not to put it in an images directory or other folder. The standard location is the “root” folder of your site, which is same directory as your home (index) page, not inside an images directory or other folder. If you put it there (and name it favicon.ico), most browsers will find it automatically.

Some browsers will look for a direct link in the HTML source code to your site's favicon.ico file. You can help these browsers by adding this link in the head section of each page on which you want the Favicon.ico to appear.

Here is the link code to include: <link href="/favicon.ico" rel="Shortcut Icon"></link>
Once you've added this code, upload all of your modified pages.

(Some people suggest that the following is actually more correct: <link href="/favicon.ico" rel="icon" type="image/x-icon"></link> You can use both if you want!)

If you want to use a GIF or PNG instead, use this format instead (just remember that it won’t work in IE):
<br /> <link href="/favicon.png" rel="icon" type="image/png"></link> or<br /> <link href="/favicon.gif" rel="icon" type="image/gif"></link><br />
Testing
If your new Favicon does not show up right away, try refreshing the page or clearing your cache — or put a '?' at the end of the url, which will trick a browser into thinking the page is new and not cached.

Troubleshooting
Browser Issues: Microsoft IE 6 for Windows will not display the favicon until the URL has been added to the favorites. Or try this trick: go up to the address bar, click on the existing (usually the IE default) favicon, then "jiggle" it a bit and let go. That will reload the page and should get the new favicon to show up.

Safari for the MAC will not display an updated favicon until the browser cache has been cleared. But choosing ‘empty cache’ from the menu won't help because Safari stores favicons in a separate cache. Go to Edit > Reset Safari, and check “Remove all website icons”. If you can’t find that, you must empty the icon cache yourself. Look for it in User>Library>Safari>Icons. On the Windows version of Safari, find C:\Documents and Settings\YourUserName\Local Settings\Application Data\Apple Computer\Safari\WebpageIcons.db. Quit Safari, delete the file, restart Safari. (Sometimes you need to restart the computer too.)

On FireFox, clear the cache and restart the browser. On Opera, just refresh.