Enable mobile template for your blogger blog

Many of you like to view blog posts on your smartphones. However, it can be difficult at times because of the small screen size. Today, Blogger Team announced that they launched of mobile templates for Blogger in Draft users. Initially available as opt-in functionality on Blogger in Draft, mobile templates will re-format your blogs for smartphones to enhance your readers’ viewing experience. To enable mobile templates for your blog, simply go to Dashboard | Settings | Email & Mobile tab, enable the mobile template option and then save settings.

• Preview: Get a glimpse of what your blog will look like by clicking on the Mobile Preview button. You can also see it on your smartphone by scanning the QR-code to the right of the options.
• Automatic redirection: All opted-in blogs will automatically be redirected to the mobile view when accessed from a smartphone.
• Template support: Blogger is initially supporting 6 variants of the Simple template and 6 variants of the Awesome template. If you have used one of these 12 templates through our Template Designer, your mobile view will be rendered in the same style as your desktop view (other template variants will be rendered as Simple). Some gadgets are also supported.

Free Christmas header images for your blogger blogs

Here are 35 free Christmas header images for your blogger blog in this Holiday Season. Click here if you don't know how to adding an image to your blog header.

Set your own photo for your Blogger blog’s background

In your Blogger Dashboard, go to Design | Template Designer | Background, click on Background Image, and you’ll notice the “Upload image” option, which will allow you to select and upload your image.

For images that fill the entire background, we recommend using a resolution of 1800 pixels wide and 1600 pixels high, and file size less than 200KB to minimize the loading time of your blog pages. Google only supports JPEG, GIF, and PNG format images.

After uploading a photo, you will see additional options that are not available for the built-in images: Alignment, Repeat, and Scroll options.

• Alignment: You can adjust horizontal (left, center, right) and vertical (top and bottom) alignment of your background image.
• Repeat (Tile): If you have a small image, you can have it repeat horizontally and/or vertically to fill the page. Otherwise, we recommend that you choose a page background color that blends in with your background image.
• Scroll: By default, your image stays in place while readers scroll the page contents. By selecting the “Scroll with page” option, both the background image and page contents scroll together. We recommend that you use an image that blends into your background color or set your image to tile vertically if you choose this option.

This feature is only available on Blogger in Draft for now.

Blogger Template Designer

Blogger Template Designer is a new way for you to easily customize the look of your blog. You can select a variety of templates, images, colors, and column layouts to make your blog an expression of you.

As you play around with the Template Designer, you’ll see a preview of how the blog will appear based on the choices you’ve made, which you can expand to by pressing the toggle to Expand Preview between the Blogger Template Designer dashboard and the preview. When you’re satisfied with the look of your blog, you can make them go live by pressing Apply to Blog in the top right hand corner of the Template Designer.

To get started with Blogger Template Designer, select a template for your blog from one of the professionally designed templates that are available. Each template appears as a large thumbnail that when clicked will show different variations on the template below that you can select by clicking on them. Note that clicking a new template will erase any customizations you’ve made on a previous template. Once you’ve chosen a template, you can continue customizing the look of your blog.

No matter what template you are previewing in Template Designer, you can always see what is currently live on your blog by looking at the Live on Blog thumbnail in the Template Designer control panel. You can also click on it to reset the template in the Template Designer to the live version of your blog.

Background

Even though you’ve chosen a template, you can still change the way that it looks. Using Blogger Template Designer, you can choose the background color or image for your blog and then play with the color scheme. To start customizing your background, click on the thumbnail under Background Image.

One of the best new features of Template Designer is the ability to change the color of your background image. This is possible when a background image has transparency. You can tell that a background image is transparent because it has a checkerboard in the top right hand corner of the image.

Once you’ve selected your image, you can change the color of the background by clicking on Main Color Theme and then selecting the color of your choice.

You can only change the color of your background if the background is transparent. Also, if the template that you chose has a grey background, you cannot change its color.

In addition to selecting and personalizing your blog’s background image, you can also choose a color theme to apply to aspects of your blog, including text and links. You can do this by playing with the Main Color Theme or by choosing one of our Suggested Themes. Changing the color theme of your blog will change the colors for all aspects of the blog template that can be changed.

Note: If background image is not transparent, themes will alter the text color scheme of the blog.

Layout

You can choose a variety of layout options for your blog, from one to three columns. These layouts feature drag and drop functionality for gadgets. You will also have a variety of layout options for the blog footer as well.

If you want to add or remove gadgets or edit gadget settings, you cannot do this through Blogger Template Designer. Rather, you have to do this on the general Layout tab.

Adjust Width

You can change the width of the blog, and the right and left columns by dragging the slider for the different parts of blog layout. Note that the options you see here correspond to the type of layout that you chose. If, for example, you chose a blog with left and right columns, you will see both left and right column sliders. If, however, you chose a blog with only a left column, you will only see that option here.

How to Backup / Restore your Blogger Template

Your Blogger blog is stylized based on a blog template that you have full access to. This blog template allows you to manipulate the visual appearance of your Blogger blog and gives you the freedom to create a unique personal brand by using the Edit HTML mode in Design tab. When you decide to enhance your Blogger blog by editing the template you will have to backup your blog template first to ensure you have a restore file in case you make a mistake in the editing process. This step-by-step guide will show you how.

• From your Blogger Dashboard, go to Design | Edit HTML.
• To backup your blog template,  click the link "Download Full Template" under the "Backup / Restore Template" pane. Choose the option to save your template file from the next dialog that pops up. Browse to the location you want to save it and click Save. The template will be downloaded to the specified location. It's a small XML file and has all the details of your current template.
• To restore your blog template, just click the Browse button and browse to the downloaded template file then click Open. Click Upload button and Blogger will restore your template.

* Make sure to backup your blog template everytime you want to edit it in Edit HTML mode.