Are you bored of typical blogger templates and want something new, something interesting and eye catchy? Or even more, are you looking for your own ‘Website’ instead of typical blog?
Yes, it is easily possible. The person who doesn’t have a thorough knowledge of programming can do this! Let’s see how it is done.
Starting with Blogger
A primary requirement for what we are going to make is, you must have an account with Blogger or Wordpress. For our convenience, we’ll take ‘Blogger’ as a platform to setup a new website. Once you are done with a registration on google (Since Blogger is powered by google), you can initiate the further process. After few steps of ‘url confirmation and account setup’, you’ll get to see following dashboard on your screen.
The menu residing at the left contains everything about the blog. Several tabs can be seen in the menu such as Posts, Stats, Comments, and Earnings etc. From these options, we are going to consider only few. Let’s take a look at them.
Posts option makes user able to write the posts which are to be shown in the blog or website. When a post is written and about to be published, the author has to mention the label, under which the post would be shown on the website. Stats, Comments, Earning, Campaigns and Pages are not important to start with a new website, so we are omitting this part.
Before going to Layout option, firstly we will finalize how our site will look alike by clicking on the Theme option. We will directly go to Theme > Customise. On the top-left corner, again a menu will appear as shown in the figure. Here, in the Themes section, you can choose any basic template for your website, because anyway we are going to modify it later. Under the Background option, you can choose a predefined background for your site or you can just upload the image as per the attribution given by blogger. Widths of the various sections of your website can be adjusted under Adjust widths option. Layout option shows what kind of layout is to be shown in the final Website, such as position of sidebar and footer is decided. In the Advanced tab, all the formatting options allow you to change font size, color and style of the font. After completing the formatting, save the settings and come back to the blogger dashboard.
Now, we have to enter the Layout section. Here, you will see a layout diagram of your new blog. We can add few gadgets if required or we can remove the existing gadgets. There are various sections in this layout. We’ll see them one by one.
- Favicon: This is a small symbol which will appear along with the title of your website at the title bar of web browser.
- Navbar: Blogger typically provides a navigation bar for the users. This bar can be turned off.
- Header: This contains the header part of your website. Blogger offers a text Header or an image header or even both. A customized attractive image can be uploaded here.
- Cross Column (1&2): In this section, the required gadgets can be added. Generally, any website has a menu below the header. So, we’ll add a menu to one of these cross columns. To add menu, go to Add a gadget > Pages. A new applet will appear. In this applet, click on Add external link. Here, ‘Page Title’ is be filled with the word which has to be shown in the menu bar of the website. In the ‘Web address (URL)’ section, type following text http://blogname/search/label/word. Here, ‘blogname’ has to be replaced by the actual blog url and the ‘word’ should be replaced by the label mentioned while writing the post. You remember it? Please refer the Paragraph regarding Post.
- Main: This section has Blog Posts option along with the edit button. User can edit this section whether he wants comments on the posts, date & time of the post and other sharing options or not.
- Sidebar: As per the user’s requirement, sidebar can be decorated with the help of various gadgets such as User profile, Visitor’s count, Sitemap, other links etc.
- Footer: By default, Blogger provides its predefined footer. You can change this if you are familiar with few HTML tags. To disable default disclaimer, the attribution widget can be turned off from the page source code.
Husshhh! We have almost done our website. But something is lagging behind. Oh yes, the personal domain! If you don’t want your site to be quoted as ‘something.blogspot.in’, we have a solution on this. There are several domain providing companies like GoDaddy who offer a personal domain for your blog or website. This has a nominal fee of say 500 INR per year. Once we purchase the domain, we just have to follow the norms given by the service provider. In few hours, the domain will get connected to the blog.
Even going ahead, if you are familiar with a basic HTML tags and a graphics designing tool like Adobe Photoshop, you can customize your website with the attractive graphics, image sliders, videos and eye catching buttons. Google anyway provides 15 GB space on their cloud for free of cost. So, why are you waiting for?
* Please visit my website www.kaustubhkasture.in if you are interested in the medieval history. And let me confess that I have made it exactly the same way which I described above in this post. Yeyyy!!!!
- © Kaustubh Kasture
email : kasturekaustubhs@gmail.com
