The big guide of blog design

As I was doing my Makeover Mondays series, I started to get asked quite a lot about blog design tips, so since I no longer have the time to design your blogs myself, I decided to make this super extensive post for those of you who want to give your blogs a brand new look.

I'm going to share with you some pretty basic (and hopefully useful) tips and some of my favorite resources and tutorials.

Tips

1. Google and pinterest are your best friends

If you see something on another blog that you love, you will most likely find a tutorial on how to do it on google. You can find almost anything here, including some pretty and free premade templates.

2. Make it easy to read

I'd like to say I put content before design, but the truth is I don't. It wouldn't be the first time I leave a blog just because the design annoys me, and trust me, you don't want that. So make your posts as easy to read as you possibly can. How?

• White background
• Dark font (maybe not pure black. But try to make it as close to it as you can)
• Large text
• Forget about hand-written fonts. No. Just.... no. As legible as you may think it is, it is not as easily read as the classics (Arial, Verdana, Helvetica...). It's ok to use it for headings and little details, but not for the whole post body.

3. Images

Make them as large as you can, and most important, make them all the same width. This makes a huge impact.

4. Say goodbye to blogger's navbar

What's the navbar? Does this sound familiar to you?

Well I'm going to tell you a little secret that some of you probably don't know... YOU CAN HIDE IT! Yes, really, for free. How? Easy as this!

In the navigation menu in the left, go to "Layout"

In the upper right corner you'll see "navbar".

And you can hide it there:

5. Change your favicon

What's a favicon?

Did you notice my blog has a custom icon instead of the boring blogger icon? Well it's so easy to change that and it makes a huge difference. How? Go to your layout (like we did before), and in the upper right corner, you'll find the favicon.

Then click on "Edit" and upload your own icon! You can actually find a lot of favicons in tumblr

6. Search widget

You don't want your visitors to leave because they can't find what they want, so make sure they do by adding the search widget. Make it as visible as you can by placing it as one of the first elements on your sidebar.

7. Keep your readers

I said you don't want them to leave because they can't find what they want, but the truth is you don't want them to leave... ever! Keep them longer on your blog by giving them some ideas on what to read next. 

How? Add a popular posts widget, and a related posts. Blogger does not offer the related posts widget, but you can find a way to add it here.

Resources

Fonts

If you're bored of the typical fonts and you want some new ones for your graphics, I recommend you download some from dafont.com 

If you want to install some on your blogger template, I recommend Google Webfonts. And google is a really nice guy, so he'll tell you how to install it.

Colors

Do you want a nice pastel pink but don't know what the code for it would be? Good news! I know who has the answer: colourlovers ! Not only can you search colors, but also palettes and patterns. Their patterns are not the best, but the color and palette search... I love it!

But... what if you find a color you love, but it's a bit too dark, or a bit too light? I'm going to tell you my secret... 0to255. It will give you the code for lighter and darker tones of that color. Hurray!

Tutorials

• Fixed navigation bar (either always, or when you scroll down)
• Add a signature to your posts
• Add a post divider
• Change the default avatars on comments for anonymous users or those with the default blogger avatar
• Add custom share buttons
• Add a back to top button

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