HOW TO: Build a More Beautiful Blog
Whether you’re blogging for business or pleasure, now is the time to take your little corner of the web to the next level. Social media makes your blog more visible and valuable than ever, and the amount of resources available to beautify and streamline your blog is enormous, and ever growing.
The best part is, you don’t have to be a designer or a programmer to create a great looking blog, but you should know where to find the right resources, and how to align your blog’s design with its purpose.
Learn Some HTML
We all wish the web was 100% drag and drop, but we’re not quite there yet. You can get away with pushing the knobs and levers on the back-end for a while, but you may never get your blog to look exactly how you envision it without knowing a little bit of HTML.
A basic understanding of the web’s nuts and bolts will allow you to make custom design tweaks, fix template problems, and format your posts more precisely. Rest assured, there’s no need to sign up for classes. Everything you need to know about the web is right here on the web.
A great place to start is W3Schools, a site that provides great free tutorials on web development. The HTML tutorial covers exactly the core basics you should know. While you won’t need to code your new blog design from the ground up, understanding how tags, text formatting, and embedding work will be extremely valuable when you want to start customizing the pre-built boxes and widgets on your site.
Blog customization is an experimental, learn-by-doing process. With a little bit of coding knowledge, a wealth of options will be open to you. If there’s something you’d like to achieve, or something that’s not quite working in your template, a Google Search can be your best friend. Chances are, someone else has had the same problem, and posted an answer or code snippet on the web that you can use.
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