Design your own blog layout!

It's so much fun to have a blog that is uniquely your own.  Not just in content, but design.  Design that reflects your personality, content, and purpose.  Good design also helps boost your ratings (so I'm told).  But how do you get a personalized blog design with out paying for it?  ...Design your own!  I won't promise that it's easy... but it can be... it just depends on you!  It can be time consuming... unless you go simple and don't vary from the directions.  But it IS fun... if you like creating things without making mess all over the house! 

First, head over to SJH Blog Design and follow their step-by-step instructions for turning a simple blogger template into your own unique design.  As well as the basic instructions for blog design, check out the other design instructions on right hand side bar, including instructions for designing a Clickable Button.  This is where I got the instructions for creating my three-column layout.  If you're feeling brave, you can customize things further by experimenting with border and margin width and all that fun stuff.  There must be someplace with more instructions for adjusting border and margin width, but I just did it with a lot of trial and error till I got the look I wanted. 

One thing I found to be helpful during the design of my blog was to create a second, private blog to use as my testing ground.  Instead of messing up my main blog, I would apply my design experiments to my test blog until I got everything right.  Then I copied the HTML and pasted everything over to my main blog.

Another site with lots of tips is Blogger Scrapbook.  I haven't had time to apply any of the tips that Sarah has given yet.  Looking over her site though she has some great tips on how to do things like How to add post divider graphics to your blog, and Adding buttons to your header, and so much more!

So there you have it!  Now you know what I know (or rather don't know, but can follow the same directions!).  I hope this was helpful!  Anyone else know of great sites for blog design instructions?