How to make a Blogger

I'm not sure how many of you will be confident with making your own Blogger from scratch without guidance, so I'll post very basic guide (screenshots with annotations included) to help you. I'll also put links to a few youtube videos if you're not a massive fan of reading or if I miss anything. Hopefully this will be helpful, but after you make your basic setup for your account I do suggest just playing around with things and seeing what happens. I'll try to not make it too wordy...

Blogger Home Page (click to enlarge)

To start off, you'll need some sort of Google account (such as a gmail...I think most people have an account on Google without even realizing it, I did at least) which doesn't take long to make if you don't have one. You then go on the Blogger home page and you'll see the option to make a new blog. I suggest naming it your something like "Mary's Art Blog" or "Mary's Final Major Project Blog" but it's up to you...I also suggest having the address being related to the title of your blog but again up to you (also depends on if the address is available). 

Creating a new blog (click to enlarge)

You can then play about with the different settings, just remember you can always preview your blog before making any final changes to how it looks. In 'Layout' you can add 'gadgets' which may be helpful...I highly recommend adding in a "Blog List" gadget and adding this main blog to it so it's easy/convenient to open this page. To do this, when you add the "Blog List" gadget, click on 'Add to List' and copy/paste http://ucacanterbury-predegreefineart.blogspot.co.uk/ and it'll show up on your account. Feel free to explore the other gadgets, but I'd say try to not make it too complicated.

Layout options (click to enlarge)

Blog List window (click to enlarge)

You can customise the look of your profile more by going into "Template" which will let you either choose the premade ones or you can "customise" or "edit HTML" (wouldn't suggest editing HTML unless you've done it before and know what you're doing). When you click on 'Customise" you'll be sent to the "Blogger Template Page". Here you can change everything from the width of your blog, to the background, font, text size, text colour, link colour (unvisited, hover, visited) and many other things. I highly recommend just playing about with these settings as it gives you a live preview of what you are changing and highlights what you are changing with red dots. Remember, it DOES NOT save the changes unless you click "Apply to Blog" so if you seriously mess up, don't worry just click 'go back to Blogger' or click on 'clear changes'/'use default'. If you do save by mistake, remember you can always restart by selecting one of the premade templates, so you're never truly doomed. Also in 'Advanced' there are many options, just remember to scroll (I didn't realise I could scroll for more options at first).

Template Designer (click to enlarge)

Now, when you're ready to make a post...you can always find a little pencil symbol or 'New Post' pretty much wherever you are on Blogger, if you can't find it just go to the Blogger home page and there will be a big orange pencil symbol where you can start your post (see first image in this post and you can see it highlighted). Now there are a few useful tips with making posts...remember to click 'save' regularly especially if you are making a long post. If you save, you don't need to post right away...you can make a post in advance and wait to post it when you're ready to. You can always update your posts after you make them and you can preview before you post it to the public (keep in mind that not everything will show up in preview such as page breaks, if you have a 'poll' gadget, and you will not be able to enlarge photos by clicking on them). Also, adding in labels will help you find posts later on if you want to search for them (for example, this post might have the label "tutorial").

Making a post (click to enlarge)

You can add in photos, videos, and hyperlinks to other websites or emails...this is pretty easy/self explanatory so I won't go too far into it. If you're unsure, do a test post to try things out. Now...adding page breaks is SUPER important in my opinion, it keeps your blog from looking cluttered. The page break pretty much just is a line that shows up when you're writing a post (I suggest placing it after the first paragraph...above image shows page break symbol/what the line looks like). Everything above the line will show up on your main page to read immediately, while everything below that line you'll need to click on 'Read More' to see. I'll post images below to show an example of how this tool helps keep your blog tidy...imagine this post without a page break, it'd be super annoying to scroll past. Here's an example...

Without Page Break (click to enlarge)

With page break (click to enlarge)

Right...so I think that's everything to get you started. Here is a youtube tutorial of how to make a Blogger if you didn't understand this so much and here is a youtube channel that goes in more depth about the gadgets/options/customisation stuff (and those were examples of hyperlinks). By the time I post this, I should have set up an email subscription gadget on the right so feel free to join that in order to get email notifications when things get posted on here.

In a few days I'll post an update of how this blog will work once more people join in and what sort of things I would like to feature on here. Thanks for reading, sorry if this was a boring post...it'll get more interesting soon I promise!

-Deanna Crisbacher