Time to play around. Create Your Blog Today TypePad
Typepad comes (at the moment) with 67 different templates and 10 different lay-outs - unlimited combinations - well almost of course, 'only' 670 to be precise.
In the Weblog tab in your account you find the design tab. This will bring you here:
The design choice starts with selecting one of the 67 pre-defined themes. Have a look at them all, try some out (by ticking the box underneath a theme you fancy and click pre-view - this will show you the template with your blog title in the banner). Every theme has its own (fixed) style in font type, font size, colour of links and titles.
Choose the one most suited to you, your unique blog, your personal style or interest by clicking the 'Save Changes' button. You decide. (And change the theme after a month, a year if you like; nothing is set in stone.)
Next up is the lay-out of your blog. Since most of you have had a look at several other blogs you have noticed that most (professional, serious) blogs have two columns or more. One wide column for the articles and one, or more smaller, columns filled with links, lists, pictures, web-tools etc that show up on every page, post. Some prefer to have the text - articles - left, others in the middle and some on the right hand side of the screen.
Again, play around, pre-view and 'Save Changes' once you have found the one most suited to you. You decide. (And change the lay-out after a month, a year if you like; nothing is set in stone.)
A bit more complex is the following step: select your content.
There are some fixed and some optional. First up are those items added to every post you will publish and how posts are archived. Most of them are self-explainable, like post title and post date header. The post footer you can configure yourself by selecting the options available (like 'author', category, time etc). What FeedBurner's FeedFlare means will be further explained during the workshops - is part of web marketing techniques, nothing to worry about now.
You can also 'organise' your sidebar modules here, but again we will delve deeper into this during the workshop. For the time being always select at least the following modules: Archive links, Categories, Recent Posts, Recent Comments, email link.
'Save Changes' will allow you the next step in finishing your design. (Once again, nothing set in stone.)
Last quick guide step in designing the look and feel of your blog: Order Content. Very simple: drag and drop the selected modules to the place you want them in your sidebar column or columns if you selected a three column lay-out. Pre-view to see if you're happy and 'Save Changes'.
(The Edit Custom CSS needs knowledge of Cascading Style Sheet coding, best left alone for now. In here you can change - among other items - the fixed font type and font size - however, code wrong and your blog might go haywire.)
All you have to do now is click on "Republish Weblog" to activate all design choices.
As promised in an earlier post: adding the sub-title, catch-phrase in the blog title banner.
In your Weblog tab select the tab Configure and if needed the weblog basics tab.
Your weblog name is shown in the first box, followed by another box: Weblog description/catchphrase.
In here you write your additional info. Adding a 'hard return' to show an empty line below the title and the subtitle is done by simple HTML-coding: <br> is the code for a 'hard return'.
'Save Changes' will activate your edited title banner immediately.
(For checking the result when you haven't published a test post yet: go back to the design tab and select pre-view - button can be found at the bottom of this page, next to 're-publish weblog)
Done, your blog is ready for its first (test) post.
(New online home-study program now available on the 1 plus 1 makes 3 blog-site: The Practical Typepad Guide on sale now! Learn how to grow your business in a simple and effective way using a blog platform)
WOW! I was just looking for this information and I stumbled upon it just now. I am ready to give TypePad a try. Thank you so much.
Posted by: Nancy | 05 March 2010 at 10:58 PM