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How to Blog Without Breaking the Bank – Part 2: Design A Blog

By now you have decided which blog platform you are going to use and whether you are purchasing your own domain name or not. It…

by  Melissa

By now you have decided which blog platform you are going to use and whether you are purchasing your own domain name or not. It is now time to think about the design of your blog.


For the sake of this lesson we are going to use Blogger as the blogging platform, but you can use much of this information with other platforms, as well. 
DIY Design 
For years I designed my blog myself. It was really up until last year when I finally purchased a template. 

Blogger offers several different styles of free templates that you can use for your blog. For me, the simple template was the one I used to design my blog how I wanted it to look. Once I got the hang of HTML & CSS coding, which really isn’t that difficult, I could tweak my blog design into anything I wanted. 

Coding is a bit of a detailed process, so I won’t be going into the actual design process in this post. But, if that is something that you’d be interested seeing in a later post, leave me a comment or shoot me an email. I can definitely put together a simple Blogger design series for a later time. 

There are quite a few tutorials out there from some very successful designers and bloggers that go into more detail about designing your own blog. Design Your Own (Lovely) Blog has an entire blog design series. I Can Build a Blog has Blogger tutorials and lots of other blogging tutorials. And XOMISSE posts a lot of blogging posts, especially geared toward Blogger.
Free Templates

If you don’t have the time to learn coding or just want to upload a template and get to blogging right away, you are in luck. There are a lot of free Blogger templates available to you. 

This site really has some cute designs. Some of my favorites are Cocktail (above), Minimal, Beauteous Carousel, and Voux Slider. Be sure to click on the “live preview” link, so you can see how the blog will look.

ODD Themes and ThemeXpose have several free designs, but they require credit. They also offer a paid versions of the designs that are customizable and do not require any credit. 

Cheap Templates

If you are willing to spend a bit of money you have many options. Etsy is the best place to look for cheap Blogger templates. As of today, the following shops offer templates under $10.00.