Monday, March 06, 2006

How to customize your design

Anne at one of my favorite teaching blogs today wrote about cool cat kid and my cool cat teacher blog. I was so honored! Here is what she says about cool cat kid:
Isn't that the coolest thing! Check it out. It is fantastic.I love the design. The kitten is adorable. I want some lessons on how to design like that. As soon as my grandkids are a little older , I will jump in that arena. I know Vicki will blaze the trail!
So, Anne, here is your lesson on how we created the design for Cool Cat Kid:

1) My daughter and I searched for free blogger templates.
2) When we found the one she liked, I downloaded and copied and pasted the code into the blogger template page. (Each one has their own set of instructions, I printed it out and followed it as I checked it off. This modeled the behavior I want to show to my children.)

3) I set up a free account on photobucket and uploaded the free photos that came with the template.

4) I customized it some with that old HTML knowhow (but not too much!). I added a counter from statcounter and claimed the blog on technorati to add those links.


All this is with one caveat: Do this before you customize your template. If you have already made changes to your blog and added technorati tags, bloglines, etc. you will want to set up a new blog or be very careful with your changes. I suggest doing this first on a test blog or a new one. I wouldn't attempt one of these with one of my existing blogs and I've been HTML coding for a while!

To learn more about blogging read my Ten Habits of Bloggers that Win. It will get you jump started!
Tags:

posted by Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher @ 11:37 AM Comments: 0