Construction Complete! How Did I Do It?

Good morning!

As you can see, I have finalized the new look of my blog.  I am very excited about it - I feel like it's a lot cleaner, not as cluttered, easy to read, and allows me to have my BIG pictures like I've always wanted. 

I find that a lot of us want or wanted that three-column template.  I enjoyed it for the time I had it, but it really was chaotic.  After playing around with the HTML in my blog design, I found that it's nearly impossible to have large pictures and a cute background, along with everytyhing else you want in your design.

So, I thought I'd take you through a few steps of what I did so you all can do the same if you so desire.

First of all - go to the Edit HTML button under Design.  Once you get there, there's a lot of gobbledy-gook...I know.  Basically all I did was change the Outer Wrapper, Main Wrapper, and Sidebar Wrapper.  These pixelated coordinates will allow you to have more space in your actual blog posts.

The minimum amount of pixels that you need in your actual blog post (main wrapper) is 600px.  I say this because when you begin to use the Updated Editor in blogger, this will allow you to have enough space for the X-Large pictures.  At first I did not like the Updated Editor and refused to use it.  I had my ways of blogging and didn't want to change.  But folks, the updated editor really is great once you get used to it. 

My Sidebar Wrapper is 310 px wide, so it didnt' look so scrunched.  Now, the only way you can have those big numbers is if you change your Outer Wrapper to a large number like 980 or 990 pixels.  My personal blog is set at 979px.  You must also change your Header Wrapper and Footer Wrapper (at the top and bottom of your html gobbledy-gook) to that same number as the Outer Wrapper.

So far, so good!?

The other part I figured out yesterday was centering my post title and date.  I was searching for quite a while and remembered that Kevin & Amanda's Blog has strict directions on changing the font, so they must have something about centering it!  I was right!!

If you used their tutorial on changing the font, you know that you have an account with Webs.com.  Well, when you go into the edit mode of your account, all you have to do is add this to your Post Title and Post Date:

text align: center;

That's it!  It worked wonders :)

I hope this helps a little bit.  I've always learned blog design on my own, I'm rather fascinated obsessed with it (my husband can attest to this).  But either way, I hope this helped you just a bit, and please feel free to e-mail me or ask questions at any time!!  Good luck you blog designer, you! :)

Happy Weekend!

PS - always click PREVIEW before you SAVE TEMPLATE when you are updating your blog.  So, if something didn't work right, you can go back and fiddle with it some more.  :)